A Bout de Souffle
by Dixie Cross
Summary: A veer-off from the early part of the book. Rhett eavesdrops twice at the Twelve Oaks BBQ. A what-if that's been done before, I imagine. (Title means 'Breathless' in French.) New chapter.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: I own nothing of GWTW (and I have nicked a few things from Mitchell in all of the chapters). _

"Can you possibly love me?"

Scarlett said nothing but looked down into her lap, hoping Charles hadn't seen her lip quiver in disgust. His fingers crushed her rings into her flesh and she distractedly folded the pleats in her dress to stop from pinching him for his tortuous clasp. Impatiently she waited for him to say something else. But the voice she heard next was not the soft, panting baritone of Charles Hamilton.

"Pray Miss O'Hara, are you going to leave the boy on tenterhooks or will you answer his question?"

The flat Charlestonian drawl boomed as a thunderclap in Scarlett's ears. She jumped, yanking her hand away from Charles' clumsy grip, and flipped her head to the right. Rhett Butler leaned against the thick oak's trunk, his brown face checkered with sunlight and the shadows of the overarching leaves. The shifting colors from above made the toothy leer, spreading casually over his full lips, gleam ominously.

For the second time in an hour the appearance of this vile man stopped her tongue and doused her skin with clammy perspiration, starting in her armpits and trickling down her spine. She could barely breathe, the heavy clamp of humiliation pinching her chest and cinching shut her lungs. So wrapped up in her own mortification, Scarlett nearly forgot Charles, until he stood up; planting his slender figure and floppy curls between Butler and she, and spoke in a low, trembling voice.

"Sir, I don't know what you are about, but your interruption is unwelcome to the lady, and to, to myself."

"I'm sorry if my presence seems obtrusive, Mr. Hamilton," Butler blandly said, drifting his dark eyes toward Charles. "I quite forgot my manners. It's been so long since I heard a heartfelt declaration my excitement overcame me."

"Yes, well, I think you ought to apologize to Miss O'Hara."

Butler muttered a perfectly polite and insincere apology to Scarlett and the mixture of amusement and interest spinning in his swift, black gaze sent a shiver through her core. A sudden panic spiked in her breast. This man was not a gentleman. Who knew what he might do or how he might act. Clearly he wasn't above eavesdropping. What would stop him from calling her out as a liar and shouting her secret shame to every soul, black and white, within earshot?

Butler bowed then, his burlesque grace all the more elegant up close, all the more stinging. His eyes teemed with mischief when he raised his pagan head again. The look was not lost on Charles. His hands balled into fists and the geranium hue of his skin warmed into puce.

"Mr. Butler, I think it best—"

But Scarlett couldn't permit Charles to finish, for fear he wouldn't be the only one made to look like a fool. A surge of vain self-preservation rerouted her designs and she cut off the would-be fiancé.

"Mr. Hamilton, I'm afraid the news of the war finally starting has made me a little giddy." She batted her bright eyes downward and swirled her sweaty fingers across the cool bench seat. "Perhaps it's best if we take some time to think things over."

"Miss O'Hara, I never meant to presume—or hurry you in to anything," Charles faltered. "I of course will respect your wishes."

Never again would any man look upon her with such tender regret. But she was too preoccupied to recognize the beauty of the expression in the pretty, boyish face. Peeking through her lashes, she only saw how pathetic it all was, and the annoying smirk on the face of the man beside him, whose irksome presence she could no longer shut out from noticing. Butler was as wretched as this wretched day had become. If only it would all end. If only the war cannons had already begun to rain down upon the south, obliterating everyone and everything that had made her feel like a silly, desperate child today. She wanted to stomp her foot and scream.

Her vengeful thoughts played animatedly over her features and Charles asked her if she was alright. Again she saw Butler smile at her like a cat with a mouse between his lips, and so summoning a gentleness she did not feel, Scarlett screwed on a doleful simper and answered Charles.

"Yes, yes I'm fine, just overcome with all this talk of war. Oh, please, Mr. Hamilton, you will write to me and let me know which regiment you'll be fighting in. I'll hardly sleep if I don't find out where you end up. It would be like not knowing where my own brother was. I can't say why, but I feel such sisterly concern for your welfare."

Charles flushed, the crimson not entirely banishing the concern and disappointment creasing his face, but for better or for worse, he did not have the opportunity to respond. At that moment a fresh melee of hollers and hoots erupted over the grounds. The clatter of voices drew the attention of all three persons under the oak tree.

Waking women, preening and pawing, flooded out the large front doors, greeted by the energetic men who still bounced around the yard and porch. Scarlett instantly spotted Melanie amid the chaos of frills and bonnets, hats and cravats. And within only an instant more, Melanie had spotted her brother, and Scarlett. Her heart-shaped face glowed with a grin when she glimpsed Charles with Scarlett. She waved and broke away from the agitated mass.

Charles smiled, half-heartedly, in return. Suddenly he seemed to want to get away. He hesitated, giving Scarlett a quick bow and favoring Butler with a stony stare, before excusing himself and hurrying off to meet his sister.

Scarlett watched him scurry away, a wild fire in her eyes. The sight of Melanie had brought back all the spite and hatred that had spurned her to manipulate Charles into proposing to her in the first place. Her escape from his fawning was little recompense for her foiled plans. Her reputation and pride were still hanging on a thread, a thread which was threatening to snap at any moment. And it was all Butler's fault. She glared up at him. If she could have killed him, she would have.

One of his eyebrows went up at her burning gaze and half of his mouth turned down.

"La donna è mobile," he muttered. His thoughtful expression sparked into one of interest. "Tell me, Miss O'Hara, how far would you go to take your revenge?"

Scarlett didn't understand his foreign-sounding phrase but she understood enough to catch the baiting quality of his silky tone. She forced calmness into her voice.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"Don't you?" he softly replied, and then continued on, as though her icy stare meant nothing.

"I used to wonder why Cleopatra loved Marc Antony more than Caesar himself, but after meeting you I find myself empathizing with the luckless, last lover. I was under the impression that people of the same breed are happiest when paired together—stripes with stripes, spots with spots, or in our southern wilderness, nice, sheltered young belles want to marry nice, sheltered young beaux. Of course, the sweet ingénue is a mere act for you, so what is the attraction of a lamb to a lioness? Could it be nothing more than the love of an easy kill? I must confess there is something unmistakably feline about you, Miss O'Hara." His eyes danced up and down her body, disrobing her once more with his gaze. "Are you hiding a tail and claws underneath that dress?"

His lurid insult was spoken with so much banality that it took Scarlett a moment for the sting of his words to sink in. She sputtered and flushed, and catching her breath at last, spat, "You are the most ill-bred, nastiest man I have or will ever meet. And I hope you die in the war before we are able to finish off the Yankees."

To her utter dismay he didn't appear the least bit offended by her vitriol. He only grinned more widely and loomed over her with more exaggeration.

"And tell me, would you be unable to sleep if you didn't know of my whereabouts also? Answer me truthfully. Your reply might persuade me to consider joining up with the doomed hotheads."

"Oh, you…"

She began to huff, before he leaned closer and whispered into her ear.

"Or better yet, to take the place of the doomed boy whom I just graciously saved from your clutches, my pretty, little Bastet."

Again, Scarlett had no idea what he had just called her, but the look he gave her, brimming with insinuation and lust, brought her up in modest outrage.

"I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your mouth, Mr. Butler. Just because you spied on me, now twice, when I was most vulnerable does not mean I will endure that sort of low-down, common insult. Good day, sir. May we never cross paths again!"

Fuming she moved to run away but as she spun on her heel, her gaze immediately fell on a sight that drained her of blood and rage.

Tucked away from the bustling guests stood Ashley, his fair hair a murky gold in the shadows of the blooming side garden. His arms were wrapped around Melanie's tiny waist, his mouth pressed against her mouth. But for the swaying of the blossoms and Melanie's skirts, their stolen embrace would have been hidden from Scarlett's view. Scarlett's young heart stilled and tears hovered on the rims of her eyes. Whatever that was not vanity or illusion out of her feelings for Ashley suffered a devastating injury. Not even from this distance could she miss the profound, searching ache of their kiss, the need sought for and received in their shared touch. Forgetting everything she stumbled back, her ankle rolling on a sprawling root. Iron-like arms broke her fall and she looked up, barely aware of the pain in her ankle as she stared into the blackest eyes she had ever seen.

With more gentleness than she thought possible, Rhett Butler placed her back on the bench. His large, warm hands lingered just a moment too long before he slid them off her waist. His swarthy face was swiped clean of that sardonic smile, and his voice was kind when he spoke.

"He may care for you, in his way, Miss O'Hara, but any fool can see he's in love with her."

Part of Scarlett wanted to shout at him—who was this piratical stranger to presume so much? But that streak of self-honesty, which had always forced her to admit truths she might otherwise choose to ignore, compelled her to remain silent and think. She must think. She could not deny what she had seen, or what she now felt. Although shocked, instinct, stronger than reason, told her that this blow would ultimately leave her unscathed. The hurt in her heart was sharp, not deep. A strange detachment from everyone and everything around her stole through her veins.

Scarlett hardly noticed Butler as her gaze hovered over his heavy shoulder toward the side garden, to where Melanie and Ashley were emerging from the secrets of the shadows. With a blank look on her face she watched them push their way through the dispersing crowd, her glassy eyes following them until they had rejoined Charles and Honey on the emptied porch. Something about the gentility of their four faces, the washed out tones of the clothes and complexions of the Hamiltons and Wilkes annoyed Scarlett. From head to heel, they were pastel, muted and pale. In a quick blink, her chagrin and heartache twisted into scorn.

What had her pa called the Wilkes yesterday? What had Mrs. Tarleton said about them only this morning? Scarlett couldn't remember the exact words but she recalled the contempt, the disdain. They were soft and weak, preferring books to life and fancy speeches to hard reality. And Ashley was the softest of them all; lost in a drowsy world she had never been able to fathom, and abruptly realized, she never wanted to know.

Scarlett's ankle throbbed and she looked down. If only she had sprained her ankle earlier in the day and been trapped on a bench, unable to go ahead with her stubborn plan. What a fool, a stupid, unseeing fool she had been to throw herself at such a useless coward! Anger started peppering her mood again, a blush her skin. The wrath was directed at herself and at the entire Wilkes family. She wanted nothing more than to go home to her mother and forget this day had ever happened. Her nails clawed the seat and she turned to the man sitting beside her. She could not read his quiet expression and did not really care to try, either. A few minutes of compassion shown by him could not excuse him for hours of rudeness.

"Mr. Butler, if you do not mind I would be much obliged if you kept your mouth shut about me, but as you are no gentleman, I know it may be too great a favor to ask."

For a second she considered demanding him to go and fetch her father, but decided against it as his sneer returned. Bracing herself for the onslaught of pain, she rose, with her chin held high, but the sprain was worse than she had anticipated and she cried out, her legs buckling out from under her. Once again strong arms stopped her from collapsing onto the mossy dirt. Butler's sultry chuckle hummed in her ear as he settled her back onto the bench.

"Determined, aren't you?" he laughed, crouching in front of her. "Are you trying to put yourself into a compromising situation with me or are you really that bullheaded? Call me arrogant, but I would wager my entire bank account—which is of considerable worth—that you have already heard the story of the last young woman who attempted to ensnare me into matrimony. Granted she wasn't half as cunning as you are, but she was most certainly more sophisticated, and even with all her refinement, took the fall from grace rather hard."

A slicing heat was racing up Scarlett's calf and so all she could manage was a heartfelt glower, the vituperative words bubbling as acid on her tongue.

"Despite what some maidens of the evangelic bent believe," he continued, "I am not a lost sheep waiting to be found, sheered of my black fleece and put out to pasture. Now you are no Saint Agnes and I am no saint at all, but I do not think you would willingly trade your, er, purity, for anything less than a wedding band. It's a shame I'm not a marrying man, Miss O'Hara but it's a bigger shame that you _are_ a marrying woman."

His bold eyes waited for her reaction, and as the full impact of his words came crashing down on top of her, she let out a strangled, ugly gasp. A thousand curses flew through her mind and her tongue couldn't latch on to a single one of them. She rapidly scanned the clusters of guests bunched here and there all over the front lawn but in her fury only saw patches of blurry shapes. No one was around to save her from this varmint? No one cared where she was?

Butler was laughing at her, and said in between subdued chortles, "Now that you are as offended as you will ever be, permit me to check that ankle of yours before you go and try to break it again, or worse break your neck."

Before she had the chance to object, his hand slithered under her billowing petticoats and she felt a gentle pressure on her swelling joint. But that was all the caress she would allow from him. At last her wrath gave way for speech and she seethed, bending over and slapping his arm away from her dress.

"Don't you dare touch me! I'm going to tell my father and he'll kill you for putting your filthy fingers all over me. How dare you speak to me like that! How dare you insinuate—you—you nasty, stinking—"

Swiftly he clutched her shaking hands into one of his massive fists and placed his other palm over her mouth.

"Please, Miss O'Hara, hush! I do not believe you want to draw attention…"

Butler's voice faded as another man's shadow streaked across her lap, darkening the bright white of the dress to a dull grey. Scarlett knew that outline, almost as well as she knew the shape of her own heart. All the vibrant glow bled from her face and her skin went cool with the pallor of humiliation. Butler's hand dropped from her wide-open mouth and, her blood freezing, Scarlett shot her eyes up.

But Ashley wasn't looking at her.

"Mr. Butler, in deference to Mr. Kennedy and my other guests, I will give you precisely three minutes to collect your things and leave my property, before I inform Mr. O'Hara of your handling of his daughter."

Scarlett had never heard Ashley sound so angry. Dumfounded, she swiveled her gaze back to Butler, too disgraced to speak. Butler stared at her, his eyes crackling and his hands, still folded over her own, warm and strong. A spark snapped between them, silent and electric. Suddenly Butler stood. He shoved his hands into his pockets, and casting her a brief, probing glance, said, "As generous as your offer is, Mr. Wilkes, I'm afraid I must decline."

"I think you misunderstood my tone if you believe it was a request."

"Not at all, but I think you misunderstood my intentions. Miss O'Hara wasn't being handled, and as for informing Mr. O'Hara, well, it is customary for the gentleman who has proposed and been accepted to petition the father of the bride for his consent and blessing."

Ashley started at this, and so he missed Scarlett's own seizure of shock. Butler grinned, adding in a brutally light voice, "It's all rather sudden, I know, but such is the way for those of us with a passion for life."

Ashley's skin somehow grew paler, the venom and significance of Butler's words as apparent to him as it was to Scarlett. She watched, half in wonder and half in shame, as Ashley bit his jaw, licking his colorless lips, and sliding a well-worn mask over his face, turned towards her.

"Is this true? Are you engaged to Mr. Butler?"

Some natural affection, whatever was left, ached inside of her at the coldness in his voice. But the echo of compassion was hollow, feeling too much like pity. She only had a moment to decide. Her gaze darted from Ashley to Butler, from gold to stone, from grey to black. She thought she saw something shimmer, intense and infinitesimal in Butler's eyes, the same electricity from moments ago, as familiar as it was foreign. Something about it provoked her, challenged her. Blood pounded in her ears and she sucked in her breath.

"Yes, I have agreed to marry Mr. Butler."

The only sign Ashley made of his disappointment was a slow twisting of his wrist, his eyes directed toward the ground. After what seemed like a lifetime to Scarlett, he muttered a terse congratulation and strode away. Scarlett trailed his retreating figure until his rigid back disappeared into the depths of the house. The fleeting recklessness seeped out of her.

A passing pang of regret beat in her heart. It was a dull, dwindling sort of throb. Everything pulsed within her in the same numb echo. Nothing made sense to her anymore. This morning she had planned on eloping with Ashley. This afternoon she had almost become engaged to his cousin. And now, she flicked her eyes up to the dark stranger standing before her, she was going to marry the wretch who ruined girls for fun and had, only a couple hours ago, told her she wasn't a lady, this rascal who wasn't received in a decent home in all of the south, probably not even at Tara.

Butler smiled, and though it was soft, and for once, devoid of mockery, her face crumpled and she shriveled into weeping. What a mess! What a horrible, horrible mess she had made of her life! Her mother would die of shame with her as a daughter! Her father would throw her out from disgrace! Everyone would look at her with the same guarded disdain as Ashley just had. Why had she said yes? If it had been anybody but Ashley, she would have said no! But that flurry of anger against Ashley—whom she really blamed it all on—flailed meaninglessly against the overwhelming sense of loss bearing down upon her.

Just as she was on the verge of abandoning herself wholly to her doomed existence, Butler's drawl, slow and clear, pulled her back from the brink. He was sitting back down beside her, and from her lowered gaze and the angles of the deepening sunlight, she could tell his sprawling bulk was shielding her from possible passersby.

"There, there. Here take my handkerchief." He flapped a clean, white square under her nose and she took it without glancing up, or even mumbling her gratitude. "It's as much a surprise to me as it is to you. Believe me, I never dreamed of marrying any woman, let alone one who was hardly more than a girl."

"I'm sixteen," she grumbled. "I'm older than my mother was when she married, and I imagine you're even younger than my pa was when he proposed."

"Well, then cheer up, he won't object. It's much more acceptable to be debauched than decrepit."

Butler's warm breath rushed across her wet skin, but he did not touch her. She would have thought that a rake like him would have pressed his privileges by now, even with a few distracted onlookers. Curious Scarlett raised her head. His black eyes were so full of incredulity and teasing, the gaze of an adventurer who has just agreed to an impossible expedition, that she laughed, in spite of herself. He laughed too and so loudly that he startled a few birds from the eaves of the branches. Their eyes met, and they laughed some more. But the easy moment could not last.

The smile wilted from Scarlett's lips and she dabbed the lingering tears from her face. Her ankle wasn't hurting so much anymore, or it could be that she was incapable of feeling much anymore. She toyed with the handkerchief, knotting it tightly around her knuckles. The laughter had created just enough release to free her mind to wander, to lay her down with worry. Heedless and harried, her worst fear bubbled out of her mouth.

"I don't love you, Mr. Butler."

"That should be no drawback. You didn't love Charles Hamilton."

"No, I don't love anyone." Her young chin jutted out. "I shall never love again."

"All the better. Loveless marriages are the backbone of society."

"That's a dreadful thing to say."

"The truth is usually dreadful, my dear."

She scowled.

"You're teasing me, Mr. Butler."

"Call me Rhett."

'I don't think I can."

"Why? I plan on calling you Scarlett. Or are your parents really so archaic?"

Scarlett frowned. She didn't want to admit that her parents never referred to each other with affection. It wasn't something she liked thinking about. A terrifying thought burst upon her mind for the first time—had her parents marriage began as forced as hers? Before the thistle of wonder could take root, she yanked her thoughts in a different direction.

"I don't want to talk about my parents. And I don't want to call you Rhett because, well, I don't think I even like you."

"Ah, I see," he said, scooting back and throwing his long leg across his knee. "Loving your spouse is dispensable but liking them is another matter. Well if it's any comfort to you, you won't be seeing much of me once we're married."

"Whether you are around or not, I will still be married to you," she said, her words eloquent with blunt indifference. "No one will come and see me, or invite me to parties and balls, or care what I do, because they all hate you so."

"Tainted by association?"

She nodded grimly, missing the sleek danger in his voice.

"That is a high price to pay. Have you ever thought about doing without a reputation?"

"Ha! No one can do without a reputation."

"My girl, anyone with real spirit can do without a reputation. Perhaps I misjudged you. Maybe you aren't who I thought you were. Good thing I didn't follow the proverbial route and have my eyes opened after the marriage. But never mind, Scarlett, it isn't too late. I have no honor, and will not hold you to your word, especially given the fact that our engagement is a complete sham, and wouldn't have happened if not for my insatiable curiosity about what I mistook for your deliciously untapped potential for destruction."

"Oh," she gasped. "Oh."

Callously he raked his eyes down her bare shoulders and onto her heaving bosom.

"Of course, you possess other sources of untapped potential, which only a blind man would fail to appreciate."

Scarlett clutched her neck and shirked away. For some reason he seemed to want to insult her, though why that should be she had no idea. Her wonder flared into irritation. A fiery indignation started licking her insides, ready to explode as a hot, barbed diatribe, but she determinedly stamped on it, not wanting to be goaded by him. Butler watched her, in cynical amusement, his mouth twisting into a smirk that she was already beginning to recognize, and loathe.

"Come on Scarlett, tell me what you're really thinking and restore my faith in you," he rasped into her ear. "Tell me what a rogue I am. Tell me all your little secrets."

His scorching breath was blasting over her skin, and finally she could take no more.

"Fine! I will tell you what I think of you, Mr. Butler. You are a soulless, heartless scoundrel and I wish I could pull down the skies and bury every last man and woman who is here today—especially you, and as for Ashley," she couldn't stop now that she had begun, it felt too good to unload her rage on this selfish cad, "I wish he had to watch his precious friends and family be flattened into dust at my command. I hate everyone and everything. The whole world is full of hateful, repulsive people. But I won't take back my word. I won't let Ashley think he matters to me anymore. And I won't be branded as a ruined woman because you had the audacity to stick your hands up my dress, and put me in an impossible situation by claiming I had accepted your proposal. You'll marry me, or mark my words; I will make you regret it for the rest of your pitiful life."

She finished, gulping in air and slumping against the bench. Angry splotches speckled her fair skin, but the wild fury in her eyes had already dimmed. Butler barked out a merry chortle and abruptly stood up. He was shaking his head, adjusting his impeccable suit, and wearing an indecent grin. Scarlett was too exhausted to be bothered by his odious reaction, she had a suspicion he was usually odious.

"Now, don't you feel better?" he asked, the smile fading from his lips, but not his eyes. "It must be refreshing for you to be entirely honest for a change."

"Are you always so rude Mr. Butler?"

"Are you always so charmingly infuriated? It's really quite becoming."

She deigned not to reply.

"Don't worry Scarlett, I won't rush you into an elopement, but as I wasn't lying about going away, I would prefer not to have a long engagement."

"What do I care about your preferences, Mr. Butler?"

For the first time he showed a flicker of frustration. "Clearly nothing in regards to my preferred name."

"Pardon me, Mr. Butler."

"You'll call me every name under heaven, except my given name. Why is that? It's not lack of frankness."

She dimpled smugly, relishing in his annoyance. It helped to distract her from her own misery. She knew it was childish and common, but right now she didn't care. He had tricked her into this mess and she would make him pay.

"I told you, Mr. Butler. I don't like you."

"And I thought I told you that I don't give a damn—or was I unclear? I wasn't lying when I said I'll be away most of the time. I'm planning on making my fortune in blockade running once the war begins. And despite what your county boys have boasted, this war's going to last longer than one watershed battle. Call me Rhett or call me a soulless, heartless scoundrel, but don't call me Mr. Butler."

"Why?"

"Because Mr. Butler is how a prostitute would address me if I were her client, and so unless you want to amend our arrangement, I suggest you call me by a different name."

Scarlett shrank back in horror as Butler brushed invisible dust off his cuffs. Her mind and heart were reeling, flying into a dark and isolated winter. Only now did the realization hit her that she knew nothing of this man, and that he might be the worst person to marry for spite. The image of her mother's warm eyes chilled with icy censure, the thought of the cold shoulders she would receive as the news of her engagement kicked up a storm of gossip, and the certainty of long years ahead, panning out as days and days of stark loneliness, sent a very real shudder through her body. The tremor ended in her feet, making her ankle swell with a fresh wave of pain.

Butler called her name twice before she noticed. Warily she squinted up at him and he inched to the left, shading her eyes from the low, glaring sun.

"You will forgive me for my behavior just now, Scarlett. Nothing's so impetuous or fragile as new love, no matter the age or experience of the afflicted. Love is a sickness full of woes, after all. A more pat phrase I couldn't come up with on my own or not at the moment anyway."

She nodded, wondering at his strange, sad face. An almost painful glimmer shone out from his black eyes, the bleak gravity of his expression touching even her muddled mind, warping her terror into confusion. But in a breath, it was gone, swept from his face as easily as the wind rushes though the pines.

"No more tears," he said. "I promise to be on my best behavior for your parents. Speaking of, I suppose I ought to go find your father, I believe he'll be more inclined to give me his blessing when he's a few sheets in the wind. Wouldn't you agree?"

Still lost, she shrugged and looked out over the lawn. The sun had slipped behind the mansion, drenching the scene in a meringue yellow and bathing their side of the oak tree in light. Squinting at the brightness, she surveyed the nearly-deserted yard. Most of the guests had escaped to cooler corners of the plantation, or were climbing into the parade of carriages trundling to a halt along the winding drive. She wasn't surprised that her pa was no where to be seen. Most likely Gerald was celebrating the good news, rip-roaringly drunk and bellowing some Irish song that was inappropriate for young ears. At the thought, she could almost make out his off-key tenor clashing with the gentle murmur of the afternoon. She looked back at Butler, and frowned. Maybe her father wouldn't give his consent, and she could be rid of him. The idea made her dimple and she flashed a brilliant smile up at Butler.

"I do believe you are right. My pa is probably still in the house. You should find him right away, Rhett."

She caressed his name like it was a song and he laughed outright, sending the few lingering birds out of the tree. To her chagrin, he bent down, swept up her hand, and brushed his lips across her wrist. That sweet electricity shot up her arm and his eyes met hers.

"Don't tempt me, Miss O'Hara, if I'm marrying you, I might as well compromise you first."

And without another backward glance, he walked away, leaving Scarlett, confused, stranded, and more than a little breathless.

_Note: Complete silliness. I wrote this some time ago and just found it. I hope you enjoyed._


	2. Chapter 2

_Note: I have too much fun writing GWTW fanfics, but this one was hard to write. You'll read how I struggled with a second chapter, but so many reviewers asked for it. So...like it or love it or leave it, here it is. _

It wasn't until two weeks later when Scarlett was lying in an unfamiliar bed, with the coarse sheets pulled up to her chin and the roar of a train engine rumbling underneath, that she realized she had ruined her life.

In after years when she thought of the short, whirlwind period of her engagement she would never quite remember the details. Time and places jumbled together into a kaleidoscope of colors and impressions. The only bright spots in her memory were the reactions of her parents when they had first confronted her about her decision—her father's drunken ranting at Twelve Oaks, his florid cheeks aflame with brandy and disbelief, and her mother's pale shock and urgent, hushed pleas to wait, to think it over, to do anything, but go forward with the marriage.

She knew Butler had somehow managed to conciliate her pa, had ended that humid, dusty April day by leading Gerald's horse all the way back to Tara, with her father slouched over on the saddle, and Scarlett and her sisters trailing silently behind in the wagon. Forever would she recall that rushed, fumbling moment when her mother had swept down the wide stairs, softly commanding Pork to carry her husband upstairs to his bedroom, and then hesitantly extending the offer for Butler to stay over for the night, Ellen's eyes growing wider and wider as they flitted between her eldest daughter and this mysterious, dark stranger. Butler had held out his hand to Scarlett then, she thought she remembered, had tenderly led her into her own home, as though it was his home and his threshold through which he stepped, and she the stranger, the outsider, the unknown. And for all purposes, it might as well have been.

The next two weeks, not barely two weeks, had streamed by with relentless force, and Scarlett a dazed bystander to the approaching doom. She barely remembered her hurt ankle, the way she had hobbled to and fro for a few days, viewing the world through a lens of pain so great that a sprain was the least of her worries, the physical ache a dull release from the numbness within. Her neighbors' shock too had been lost in the shuffle of chaotic wedding and war plans, their looks of surprise and expressions of reproach, locked behind closed doors and years of southern hospitality. Some wives and daughters had merely raised their eye brows, slapped open their fans, and through silent nods and gestures agreed that Scarlett's slick, strange marriage was the only possible outcome for a girl who flouted propriety at every opportunity. Although most folks of Clayton County barely had time to give the marriage pause, the scandal of an unexpected, unsuited match nothing compared to the great, looming disaster of war.

For Scarlett, even the hot, impotent vows of the Tarleton twins to kill themselves, kill her, and most especially kill that no-good Yankee sympathizer who had somehow seduced her into matrimony, had fizzled and faded away as smoke in the breeze. Memories lost, never to be recovered. Only her parents, and, despite her attempt to forget, to erase them for good, Ashley and Melanie's whitewashed and gaunt faces, their stalwart and valiant attendance at her hasty, sparsely-attended wedding would remain with her, would flare up as specters in her dreams or as ghosts in her waking hours. Yet she could not really say even that much. She had not said much at all.

Everything had happened too quickly, and Scarlett had let it happen, watching her life pass before her as though she had no control over where it was going or how it would end. It had been a dream, a terrible, terrible dream. If she had pinched herself hard enough, she would have woken up. She should have woken up. That is what she had told herself, what she had whispered during the sleepless nights and muttered during the day, while she had adamantly refused to stop it from coming and stubbornly, doggedly thrown herself into the future.

But then it did happen. The marriage done, the bride and groom hurried off before supper time to catch a train, jammed into an overnight compartment on the last ride out of Jonesboro, heading off to the sea and Charleston, and as far away from Tara and Ellen, and the sweet, abundant life she had known, had only ever known, and so carelessly, callously discarded. She was alone, more alone than she had ever been, and the only comfort would be the company of a man she hardly knew, had hardly seen since the morning after his proposal, and who she hardly even liked.

The train rocked back and forth, careening around a sudden bend in the tracks, and she bit down on her lip, sinking her teeth further into her flesh as Butler suddenly slipped inside their compartment. He had stepped out about an hour before to enjoy a free night cap, and she had been too relieved to realize that the courtesy drink had been entirely for her benefit.

He nodded at her and she nodded back. She watched him watch her, see through the blankets to her shivering body, to her skin, exposed and vulnerable in the silk nightgown her mother had carefully folded into her case earlier that week, and her mind was immediately pulled into a hundred different directions. He turned away toward his valise and Scarlett's eyes spun up and down his body.

He wore a grey traveling suit, cut and tailored elegantly along his tall, wide build. Every strand of his thick, obsidian hair lay perfectly flat and his brown skin appeared almost golden in the low light of the train's lamps. He moved, stretching out of his jacket, the muscles in his arms rolling as ocean waves beneath his thin, white shirt, and sat down on the bench just inches from where she was forgetting to breathe. She stared at his sprawling chest, at how wide his shoulders spanned, and at how large his hands were, and her blood pounded loudly in her ears.

None of Scarlett's chaste kisses and coquettish airs had prepared her for this night. She knew nothing of what men were like or what they liked, and she didn't want to know. Two days ago Ellen, as red as the Georgian clay, had approached her and told her that there were certain expectations a husband had of his wife, and that a lady must endure those bizarre desires, suffer through the pain and mortification so that children might come and men might be content. Her mother had not explained more, no hint of how the actual honeymoon night would pass away, no extra blush on what the details of the end of her maidenhood might entail.

She knew nothing, nothing at all, but the fear creeping up her throat and the panic paralyzing her lungs, nothing but the utter expanse and foreignness of the man who was facing her, his sharp features blurred in the hazy glow of the compartment and his eyes glittering ominously a foot away.

Out of the shadows, Butler struck a match, and the spark of the flint sizzled with the sound of a thousand bonfires in Scarlett's head. It was enough to break her trance and she jumped, clenching the sheets up with her and knocking back against the wall.

"Don't you dare come near me," she rasped. "Don't you dare touch me."

Butler did not immediately respond, but looked at her, sucking slowly on a cigar. Cornered against the wall, Scarlett panted and prayed. She had no idea what he would do next. She trusted him now as little as she had trusted him on their first encounter.

For a full five minutes he smoked on and she panted. Soon a fragrant cloud hovered in the compartment. The smell reminded her of her father's scent and her heart and breathing slowed. Butler tossed the cigar aside and swung his legs out, as at ease as a panther on a perch.

"Scarlett, do you know why I came back?"

Confused, she twisted the sheets between her fingers and shook her head. "Came back?"

"Yes."

"Came back to the compartment?"

He laughed and leaned forward. "No, came back and married you."

"Oh," she exhaled and cast her eyes down. Instantly her mind called forth those moments during the last two weeks when the fog of her detached wonder had lifted and she had briefly felt the untempered horror and folly of her breakneck engagement, and had wished Butler would never return. Why had he returned? It would have been so fine if he had never come back. She peeked at him through her bristly lashes and glared.

He noticed and laughed again, his teeth gleaming brilliantly against his tan face. She hated that stupid laugh of his. It always made her feel like she was on the wrong side of a joke, the butt of it or outside of it.

"Tell me Scarlett, did you wear your rosaries out praying for my demise? Or, at least, for me to live up to my rakish reputation and leave you stranded at the altar?"

"No!" she cried, flipping her head up. His dancing eyes gave her the lie and she nervously licked her lips. "I would never."

"Well then, your faith is far greater than most. It was the height of bad manners for me to behave so honorably, when you had every reason to hope for the worst."

She lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes. "So why did you come back and marry me? I know it wasn't for my sake, or honor's sake. Did you do it for a good laugh? I think you would do almost anything for a good laugh, Mr. Butler."

His smile fell and a shadow passed over his face. A tingling swirl of fear started to skitter up Scarlett's spine and she wondered if she had crossed the line by calling him Mr. Butler. She fidgeted under his opaque gaze, hugging the scratchy sheet against her raised skin. Again he made her wait, to wonder and heave as he pierced her with those black, black eyes.

"You are such a child," he whispered at last. "And whatever else you may think, Scarlett, I did come back for your sake. Call it some forgotten sentimentality from my childhood or leftover hope from my youth, but for whatever reason, I couldn't ruin you."

He stood up abruptly and started to undress. Dumbstruck Scarlett stared at him, without seeing him. She hadn't expected him to be so sincere. She hadn't known he could be that genuine. Out of their brief interactions she had only ever heard him be flippant and cynical, jeering and cool. Who was this man—her husband?

Husband. The word thudded dully in her brain, the off-key chord of a broken piano. Husband. It clanged again and again. She, Scarlett O'Hara, had a husband. With the word, came the image, came the reality, and her eyes focused on the man. And then she gasped.

Butler was shirtless, his entire back exposed, the muscles of his body no longer obscured by cotton and colors. He bent over to finish unlacing his boots and she could see every sinuous rivulet shiver and expand. He was tan to his waist, and without the clever lines of a tailor, he was more massive, no more a southern gentleman but a rough sailor or a wild pirate.

Heat spilled into Scarlett's face and seeped down her neck. She slunk down onto the mattress and turned away. The sight of his nudity had wiped every other thought from her mind but the remembrance of where she was and what was expected of her. All the crippling anxiety washed over her anew, spiked with more potency. She closed her eyes and started muttering a Hail Mary.

She heard the lamp sputter out and felt the bed sink as Butler sat down beside her.

"Scarlett?"

"Yes?"

"What are you doing?"

She didn't want to answer him, but she didn't want to come off as a coward either. She opened her eyes, grateful for the dark.

"That's none of your business."

"I think it is."

"I don't care what you think."

"Nevertheless. I want you to answer me."

He shifted closer, still sitting up, and Scarlett scooted nearer to the wall. The roar of the train hummed in her ear and she blew out her breath.

"I was praying."

"I thought so," he muttered, chuckling. Suddenly he leaned over her, his breath blasting on her face. "It won't save you from me. I have the laws of man, and for once, even the laws of God, on my side."

"You wouldn't dare." Her voice quivered.

"Wouldn't I?"

"I'll scream if you touch me."

"One day, I promise you, you'll scream if I don't."

She couldn't make out his expression. He was only a darker shade of tar in a lightless room. But his voice carried a smirk.

"Are you, are you teasing me?"

"Maybe I'm seducing you." He rubbed his thumb along her jaw and she froze. "Or maybe, maybe I'm trying to tell you without actually repeating myself that I won't ruin you."

Soft lips brushed the top of her head and he moved back. The mattress creaked as his weight lifted off the bed. He swiped a pillow from beside her and crouched down onto the floor. Not for the first time tonight Scarlett was left speechless. She squinted into the pitch at him, baffled and relieved and a little humiliated.

"You aren't…you don't…" she stammered, blood pooling warmly in her cheeks. "Don't you want to share my bed?"

The outline of his head and shoulders popped up. "What a leading question for a chaste, southern bride."

She could just feel his mocking grin, the way his eyes were melting with mischief and ridicule, and she flipped onto her side. Oh, why couldn't she have just rolled over and tried to sleep? Her body was screaming for rest. Curse her rambling tongue!

"I…I would like to go to sleep now."

"And you will, but not before I say something that hardly needs to be said, my vain ingénue. Did it never occur to you that this is as new an experience for me as it is for you?"

"Fiddle-dee-dee," she scoffed.

He chuckled and tapped his hand on the mattress, jostling her. "I may have been in many women's beds, but I have never shared my bed with a woman, and certainly not one who was my wife."

Scarlett dug her nails into the blankets, blushing from hairline to heel. What kind of a husband talked about his former lovers with his wife? She had heard about men who preyed upon girls, or visited bawdy houses, but she had always supposed they were strangers—foreigners or drunkards or Yankees—not men she knew, not the man who was her husband.

He laughed again and drawled on, "No, I don't tell you this to make you blush or shock you. I tell you this so that you know I am not afraid of you. In fact, some might even say I have a gift in the art of seduction, and as kind or strange as my forbearance seems tonight, it is not entirely altruistic and certainly not without explanation."

"I don't care to hear your explanation."

"I will tell you it all the same. First, I don't like the idea of lying with a child who may still be in love with another man."

Scarlett scowled. "I'm not a child. And I'm not in love with anyone."

"I won't quibble about the first point, but I was witness to that precious scene at Twelve Oaks, and knowing the type of girl you are, and knowing the type of man Ashley Wilkes is, I don't trust your emphatic second denial."

"I was young and silly. It was a foolish mistake."

"It was two weeks ago."

"A lot can change in two weeks."

"Evidently."

Scarlett ground her teeth together. More than Butler, much more than herself, she blamed her troubles on Ashley Wilkes. It was his fault she had been tricked and cajoled, prodded and bound to this loveless, luckless marriage. It was his hands that had soiled her reputation, his obstinate, drowsy rebuff that had tarnished her bright future and saddled her with nothing but broken dreams and shattered hopes.

She knew she had never loved before—knew that the man she had thought she loved did not exist, had never existed, and those feelings of infatuation and admiration had hardened, turned by resentment and disappointment, into a deep, seething contempt. Her youth and inexperience made this singular disappointment in her life the hinge upon which the rest of her days would turn. That sweet love, which would have crystallized into an immovable obsession, had broken into a thousand jagged pieces; had become the one true thing in her life. She didn't know the man she had married. She didn't know what she was going to do about her destroyed world. But she knew she hated Ashley Wilkes.

And here was Butler, goading her, teasing her, nettling her in his silky, nasty way about the only thing she knew for certain. Her voice was low and the truth in her words as cold and unforgiving as ice.

"I don't care what you think you know about me, but I do not love anyone. Not you. Not some other man. And as God as my witness, not Ashley Wilkes."

The train trundled on, the wind howled, and Butler let out a low whistle.

"That makes my second reason for not claiming my matrimonial privileges that much more difficult to follow, and that much more important to heed."

"I'm going to sleep," she spat, her anger spiked and her nerves tender. "I don't care to hear any more of your reasons."

"Oh but you do!" he exclaimed. "I cannot permit you to spend even one night laboring under the delusion that I am impotent or uninterested."

From the depths of the floor, his arm snaked out, grabbed at her shoulder, and unceremoniously shook her onto her back. She yelped and plucked at the tumbling, tangled sheets, fumbling in the dark and despising the sound of his low, rumbling laughter.

"You really are the most vulgar man I have ever met," she yelled into the night.

"Then you haven't met many men."

He braced his arms around her and she felt the scratch of his arm hair against her bare shoulders, could smell the fragrance of brandy and cigars on his breath. He was all around her, without her being able to see him, and the suffocating blindness made everything more frightening, and somehow more intimate. Her heart thumped and her muscles tensed.

"I will scream. I mean it."

"And what do you think would happen if you screamed? Who would come to save you? They all know this is our honeymoon night. The conductor and railway staff are staying as far away from our compartment as possible, and if they do hear you scream, they'd only wink at me or smack me on the back, in the morning."

"I…I thought you said…"

"I'm not going to force myself on you tonight, Scarlett, or any night for that matter. I'm only trying to answer your question, since you were ignorant or brash enough to ask it."

He eased back and her body relaxed. She knew he was still close, the shadowy contours of his body somewhere within her reach, but her pulse flowed to a steady beat and she sighed.

"I don't think I'm going to like being married."

"I don't think you know what marriage is," he replied. "But that's neither here nor there at the moment. Scarlett have you ever had to break a horse?"

"No."

"Well I have. It's a tricky business. You find a wild colt, with a mean buck and a world of promise, and you have to break it just right so that you don't turn all that potential power and grace into nothing but a beautiful, useless beast. A truly untamed animal requires time to become a powerful racehorse."

She had only partially been listening, but she had heard enough. "Are you calling me a horse?"

"There's hope for you yet, my pet. Yes, I am. And when I'm through with you, I'll be able to ride you like the wind."

He barked a high-pitched chortle and Scarlett rustled deeper into the bed, uncomfortable and offended, though she didn't quite understand why.

"What's so funny?"

"You are."

"Because you think I'm a horse?"

"No, because for all your low-cut dresses and daring flirtations, you're as pure as Diana, and because, you know nothing of men. Nothing at all, my dear. You thought I didn't want you. What man under eighty and over twelve wouldn't want you in his bed? With your soft curves," he slid his finger along her hip and she sucked in her breath, "your creamy skin," he skimmed his thumb across the edge of her collar bone, "and those eyes, that since the moment I saw you bewitching Charles Hamilton with them, have wanted to know just what shade of green they'd turn when I kissed you?"

Scarlett sensed the prickle of his breath before she felt the heat of his lips. They were slow and hot, and his mustache tickled her skin. He pressed the kiss deeper and longer, sending tremors from the base of her neck down through her spine. She'd never been kissed like this, never known the sting of passion and the chill of desire that rushed over the flesh and into the blood. She was frightened and blind, clinging to a mass of skin and fire, and somehow kissing the unseen darkness back.

The kiss could have lasted one minute or one hour, time evaporating meaninglessly into the void of the room. When he pulled away, sliding off the bed without a muttering a word and leaving her feeling cold and suddenly so much more alone, she couldn't move or blink. Her body was still reacting to the thrill of his touch, the slow burn of his lips, the exhilarating shock of his tongue in her mouth, and the weight of his body on top of her own. Each sensation was a new fascination. Each caress had evoked a new emotion. She didn't know if her blood was pumping fast or slow. Was her breathing shallow or heavy?

He had kissed her at their wedding, a brief blush of touch, but this had been something new and different and invigorating. It had been electric and earthy, lightning packed into a single touch. And she wondered, gripping at the emptiness around her, if this meant she loved him. But she didn't know. She didn't trust herself.

Everything in her world was spinning out of her control, her entire life being thrust forward, speeding by on tracks that led to nowhere. She ached for a dreamless escape. The violence of the changes that were erupting all around her had welled up a storm of emotion that would only be calmed by the still, still hours of night. But for two weeks she hadn't been able to sleep. For two weeks she had been unable to find release. And now, her heart was drumming against her rib cage, and she wanted to know what would happen if Butler, if _Rhett_ touched her again, wanted to know as much as she feared what would happen if he touched her again.

Exhausted and confused she broke down, sobbing and crying over all that she had lost and everything she had forsaken—her home, her family, her freedom. She wanted to reverse time, to return to that BBQ at Twelve Oaks and soak in the adoration of the men, glory in the envy of every other woman there, and dance and dance late into the night, never confessing her girlish love to Ashley, never being shoved into marriage, never hearing the call of the boys as they fled down the steps and cheered for the oncoming war. She wanted everything and everyone back—and nothing and no one of what she had now.

She didn't know when it happened, but at some point, Rhett was beside her, cradling her in his sturdy arms, whispering tender nothings into her ear, drying her tears and wiping away the grief and sadness, and shock, the utter shock, of the last two weeks. He was so warm and kind, and she remembered that he had been kind before, on the bench when she had finally seen Ashley clearly for the first time. For a silent sob she spared a thought for her husband, thinking that things might not be so bad, that her life might not be completely ruined. But the hope was fleeting, a sliver of light that slipped through her grasp before she had time to truly feel it. She was too young and hurt and lost for anything but despair to linger.

Late into the night she wept, and Rhett held her, never shushing or mocking her. He just comforted her, letting the salty sorrow of her young heart spill out onto him and wet his skin. She forgot he was shirtless, that her cheek was pressed against his bare chest, and that her own body was exposed, the blankets and sheets loosening from around her shoulders and revealing her sheer nightgown and undraped limbs. She was wrapped up in his strong embrace and the black night, until her sobs stilled and she gradually drifted off to sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

When Scarlett arrived in Charleston that bright, spring day in April 1861, she paused on the lower step of the train and looked out at her new home, her youthful face a reflection of the hope and fear energizing the south. The noon sun beat down on her head, welcoming her with a pleasant but brutal warmth. The air smelled like a strange witch's brew—tangy from sweat and bodies, sweet from moss and magnolias, and the scent of the sea blowing in from the east, texturing everything and everyone with the flavor of salt. Throngs of men and women crowded the platform, a mess of wagons, buggies and carriages clustered around the station, and everywhere her fierce gaze turned more people and animals and wheels were pushing their way through the deliberate chaos. She had never seen so many people gathered together at one time.

Taking a deep breath, she braced herself, her apple-green "second day" dress swaying in the breeze. Her eyes still tingled from the excess of tears, her throat was raw, and her slender shoulders sagged ever so slightly. She wanted to shed the heartbreak from last night, and the weariness of the last two weeks, but she didn't know if she could summon the will, not here, not where the voices shouting over the commotion were flat, not where even the horses turned their noses up. And then her gaze caught sight of Rhett, his tall head bobbing above the teeming horde, and she raised her chin.

There was something evocative about seeing him, something that emboldened her to brave this new world of the old south. He was so much taller than most of those around him, so much broader and stronger, gracefully snaking his body through the maze of people as a tiger would through the reeds. She blushed as she remembered waking up this morning, his chest smeared with the imprint of her cheek and her nightgown hiked up to her thighs. She had immediately tried to yank it down, but his hand had covered hers, and with a flush on her skin and a growing simmer in her abdomen, he had slowly glided the silk back down her legs. He had stared at her then, sweeping his eyes across her face and brushing back her hair that had become unruly in the night.

They hadn't spoken much during the rest of the morning, the longest conversation consisting of him telling her, as the train had chugged into the station, that he would hurry out to ready their ride and send their luggage on ahead to the hotel where they would be staying. The prospect of spending another night with him, of spending most of her nights with him stirred her curiosity, a nudging of interest mixed with trepidation.

Rhett easily blazed a trail straight to her side and a soft, carefree grin spread over her lips. It was the first genuine smile she had worn for weeks, the first real smile Rhett had ever seen on her. In that instant, for an instant, she was the bride, glaringly fresh and beautiful, unaware of her glory, utterly ignorant of the glow in her groom's eye.

She clapped her hands together and beamed. "Is it always so crowded?"

"No, but if you haven't heard by now, we started a war here a few weeks back."

She giggled, gathering up her skirts to descend, when Rhett smiled wickedly and scooped her up off the train without another word. She cried out in surprise, a wallow that was immediately swallowed up in the cacophony of noise, and covered her face.

"I'm perfectly capable of walking myself," she fumed into his ear.

"Time is money, my pet," he said, knocking her feet into a pole. "And I need more of the former, because I want more of the latter."

She dropped her hands away from her face and scowled. "Didn't your mother ever teach you that it's rude to talk about money in public?"

"Didn't your mother ever teach you to say thank you when a gentleman offers you his assistance?"

"Yes, but you didn't _offer_ me anything, and you aren't a gentleman."

He threw back his head and laughed so loudly that she shrank back behind her hands again. Vaguely she wondered if there was anything that embarrassed him, or mattered to him. Cradling her as a baby against his chest, he continued to carry her through the crowd, only mortifying her further by whistling an Irish lullaby.

"Here we are," he said, swinging her into an open buggy, not bothering to take care that her petticoats remained hidden underneath the billows of green fabric.

Onlookers saw a flash of lace and stockings, the men ogling the slender ankles and the women pretending not to have noticed. Scarlett gasped, frantically smoothing down her dress and covering her legs, as Rhett loped around to the other side, picked up the reins, and sprang the horse, which had been chewing on a sad, little patch of grass, trampled mostly into mud by spurs and boots, to life. The buggy rocked forward and she bumped into Rhett's hard shoulder.

"You could have given me some warning," she grumbled.

"You could have waited in the compartment like I told you to," he answered, tipping his hat at two teamsters still winking at his wife. "This depot's no place for you today."

She crossed her arms and scooted away from him. Rhett quickly maneuvered the buggy away from the train station and the Charlestonian streets fanned out before them, streaks of cobbled stone leading to high-rise walls draped in wisteria. The sidewalks were less crowded as they jostled their way through town, Rhett pointing out this historical site or that ancient church. She let his slow drawl wash over her, remembering the last and only time she had visited here.

Several years ago her mother had taken her and her sisters to stay with their aunts. Scarlett must have been six or seven years old and the only impression that had remained with her was how creepy her Aunt Pauline's plantation was, with those dangling vines that twitched in the wind and made her have nightmares about gigantic claws reaching out to catch and strangle her. For days she had cried to go home, throwing tantrums and refusing to play with her older boy cousins, until her demands had been met and she had been safely returned to her pa.

Observing the heavy tree boughs that drooped all the way to the ground and the flower buds that stubbornly forced their way through the tiniest cracks in the stone, Scarlett felt the same nauseating revulsion that had frightened her as a child, and the sinking realization that no amount of kicking and moping would deliver her from this encroaching country. Her troubled gaze jumped from the scenery to the faces of the people walking by, and after three consecutive passersby abruptly changed direction or crossed the street opposite to their buggy, the pangs of loathing in her gut sharpened with anxiety.

"Why are they doing that?" she asked, interrupting Rhett mid-sentence.

"Why are who doing what?"

"That."

She pointed discreetly at an elderly woman who had immediately stumbled to halt and spun away, pretending to be interested in a dying shrub, the moment Scarlett had locked eyes with her.

Rhett stared at the woman's back for a second, and then clicked the horse to a trot and picked up from exactly where he had been cut off, telling Scarlett about the St. Cecilia ball. Scarlett had to cling onto her bonnet and the side of the buggy to steady herself, darting her eyes back between Rhett and the woman who was shrinking from her view, his steady voice at odds with the speed of their ride, and the panic rising in her chest.

"Aren't you going to answer me?" she said, gulping in a mouthful of her own hair as the buggy whirred around a corner.

Rhett ignored her, dryly droning on about this family and that plantation. She sputtered, bristling from his obstinate deafness, and glaring out at the street that had now burst into the town square.

The hub of Charleston was breathtaking, the architecture refined, and the vibrancy of the bloom of spring and the fervor of war brightening its weathered, elegant structures, with banners and flags flapping next to swags of blossoms. But everywhere Scarlett turned, it was dull and grey. Cheeks were averted and eyes were downcast. Her annoyance battled with her alarm, that thing she had dreaded so much she had forgotten to remember, that thing she had told herself time and time again to think about tomorrow. With each passing person, she feared that tomorrow had come.

Her eyes flitted this way and that, meeting cold stares and mirthless lips, and Rhett blathered on and on about people she didn't know and already hated. She felt the wind seeping out of her and soon she was suffocating, her stays pinching shut her lungs. Rhett parked the buggy under the eaves of a tall building, but she didn't bother glancing up. Not now. The world had pitched into a darker, angrier hue and she couldn't see anything but her dread, could barely breathe. He was still talking and she whipped around and seethed at him.

"I don't want to hear about your—history or your balls or your stupid cathedrals. I want to know why no one will even nod at me. I want to know why I feel like my face has gone purple or my hair's caught on fire."

Finally he stopped talking and lounged against the buggy's back board, smirking in that careless way of his that made her palm itch to slap him.

"Is that so?"

"Yes, that's so, and if you had any raising at all you would have answered me ages ago. I don't know why I started to believe you weren't a complete rascal. Great balls of fire! How am I ever going to put up with you for an entire lifetime?"

Somehow just unburdening herself made her start to feel a little better. The tightening in her chest was lessening, the air around her lightening. She scanned the hotel's driveway, one of the bellhops tipping his hat at her, and she felt a tremor of hope. At least some people in Charleston were kind. She blew out a deep, staggering sigh and with her fury deflating, fixed her gaze back on Rhett.

The light wind fluttered against his suit and the sun shined down on his back. A patch of shade had drifted over his half his face, casting a beard-like shadow across his jaw. His black eyes sparked with a carnal, dangerous light and she thought he looked like a wild mountain man.

He cocked one eyebrow up and his head to the side. "I'll wager you'll find a way to put up with me, pet. You are remarkably resilient, despite your complete inexperience in the ways of the world."

"I have experience enough for you to give me a straight answer, thank you very much."

"Really? One innocent night with me and you are experienced?"

A speckle of heat hit her cheeks and she glimpsed the bellhop choke on a laugh. "Can you at least pretend to have some decency? You can't just go around saying things like that."

"Things like what?"

"You know what. I may just be a country girl from Georgia, but I'm not as ignorant as Eve."

"Oh, I would have to disagree, and speaking from experience, I think Adam would be more tempted by you to eat the fruit."

He grinned, tapping his hand against the buggy and shooting her one of those impish, disrobing looks. Only this time, even in her aggravation, her heart raced and a thick emotion she could not name coursed in her veins. Confused, she fidgeted with her bonnet's ribbon, tying it more firmly underneath her chin.

"I think you're a conceited blackguard," she said distractedly.

"Quite prescient of you to bring up Eve, though. In all your years of catechisms and Hail Mary's did you learn what happened to her son after he murdered her other son?"

"I have an idea something similar might happen to me after I murder you," she muttered.

He chuckled and sat up, reaching out his hand and tilting up her chin. "If you break my heart, I hope you follow through with that threat."

Her eyes widened at his words. This wasn't the first declaration she had heard, but this was the first she wasn't sure was a declaration at all. Break his heart? Did he have a heart to break? She longed to feel triumphant, to command him with a wave of her arm or a flicker of her finger, but she couldn't tell if he was only teasing her. And her mind could hardly focus on trying to figure it out now, not with the bustle of a town square all around and his skin touching her skin. He dropped his hand and lazily reclined back.

"Answer my question, Scarlett, and I promise you, I'll answer yours. What happened to Eve's son, to Cain, when he murdered his brother?"

She blinked a few times, that bubble of fear starting to come back. "He…he was cursed."

"More than that, he was cast out. In Charleston, amongst the pure and virtuous folk, just think of yourself as the wife of Cain."

"Why? What do you mean?"

He smiled at her, his black eyes crinkling around the edges. "I realize that most of my lesson, yes_ lesson_, fell on fallow ground, but if you could let one thing take root in that pretty, empty head of yours, let it be this—not one of those old blood, God-fearing, true Charlestonian women—nor most of their men—whose tales and histories and homes I have talked to you about and shown to you today will look at you, will talk to you, or will receive you, at present. So, as I said, my dear Mrs. Butler, you'll find a way to put up with me as a companion, because frankly you don't have a choice."

She let out an almost-silent "oh," a faint grunt of despair. He hadn't sounded mean or hurtful, but the words had pierced her straight through. All her fear realized in a single, bland statement. Unthinkingly she grabbed hold of his hand, her panic shining out of her green eyes and paling her cheeks.

"Then I am ruined. You have ruined me."

"No Scarlett, I've rescued you."

Her eyes flashed with annoyance and she pulled her hands back into her lap. "Rescued me? How? By tricking me into marriage and stealing me away from my home?"

"Of course not. I didn't steal you, and while I admit there was a bit of a dare when I proposed, I didn't trick you either. I believe you actually told me you would kill me if I didn't marry you. But however questionable the circumstances were that led to our connubial bliss, one outcome remains undeniable. Our marriage freed you from your prison."

"Prison?"

"Yes, prison—the archaic, lovely jailhouse you and I grew up in, built on arbitrary rule after arbitrary rule, brick after brick of how you should think, what you should say, whom you should marry and who you should be. The sanctity of your reputation is your fetters. The judgment of others is your cell. It's the deadliest prison on earth; the walls are invisible, to all but the most enlightened of souls."

"And I suppose you think you are an enlightened soul?"

"Naturally, even Kant would agree. And as such, I am duty-bound to set the captives free, especially ones with emerald eyes, tiny waists, and lips the color of cherries."

She tossed her head at his compliment and rolled her eyes. "How you do run on. You can't sweet talk me into thinking I was raised in a prison—I'm married to you, aren't I? If I'd been in prison, my parents would never have let me run off with you."

"True, but why are you here Scarlett? Stop and think about it. Ironically, it was those meaningless expectations of society that landed you with a scoundrel like me. Your parents would rather you wed an infidel than tarnish the mere idea of your virtue. Better be married and actually, er, deflowered, than to be single and untouched, but impure."

She frowned at him. Most of what he was saying rushed through her brain as articulated nonsense. She knew he thought she was a fool, knew he was smarter than she was, and she despised his superiority. For during the last two days, as much as he was dissimilar to Ashley Wilkes, the unfathomable, layered way he spoke reminded her of him. Except, except when Rhett talked on and on about something she sensed he had a grain of truth on his side, some tangible, hardened practicality. But did that mean he was right about this? Had she lived her life behind unseen prison gates?

She had always been stifled by the lists and lists of rules, straining against the constricting codes of conduct, her true, unchecked self constantly running up against the prim, proper southern lady she was supposed to be impersonating, and very often breaking loose, the stays of her societal corset being ripped apart by her vivacity and vigor. The idea that she could be free of those binds was new, but also perilous, putting at risk her sense of security. The columns that upheld her world, the world where she felt safe, as far away from it as she was right now, might be bars in her prison cell, but they were also her protection, and she wasn't ready for them to be toppled.

She shook her head, pushing away the blasphemous thoughts to corners of her mind where they would not bother her, not today, pushing aside too the fact that polite, pretentious society would snub her. She summoned her charm to worry about it all tomorrow, or maybe even the next day. It hurt or baffled her too much to do anything else today.

"You can go on and on about imagined prisons and unsuspecting prisoners," she airily said, "but I'm not going to buy a word of it."

"But as you so aptly phrased it," he jeered. "You are going to have to put up with me for a lifetime. I'm sure I'll convince you of it over the years. In the meantime, I'll enjoy the pleasures of liberty for the both of us. For instance, your new prison."

He gestured behind her and at last she craned her neck up. Towering above her was a tall, ornate building, with buttresses shooting out from the roof and stained glass windows shimmering in the afternoon sun. Her breath caught and Rhett whispered into her ear, his breath dancing pleasantly across her skin, "Shall I carry you all the way through the lobby or just over the threshold into our room?"

_~Souffle~_

Scarlett stood on the balcony of her honeymoon suite, the warm, navy night cloaking her skin and staving off the chill of a late rain shower. Her room was on the hotel's top story, and looking out across the wet rooftops and steeples, she could just perceive the glittering ocean as its waves caught the light from the bright moon. The overpowering vastness of Charleston both awed and diminished her. The place was as alive and deadly as the sea which lapped against its shores, impenetrable as its depths and uncompromising as its tides. She hated it, instinctively, because it was so different from Tara, hated it because it sprawled where it should narrow, and crept up where it should open wide. She hated it because she would be all alone here, as alone as she had been since Rhett had left to complete some urgent business.

She had never really been alone like this, never known what loneliness tasted like. Tara had always been full of people and noises, the songs from the cotton fields drifting in with the breeze, the thumps and bumps of feet on the stairs, the humming of her mother, or the chattering of her sisters. She had taken it for granted, just as she had taken everything in her life for granted, never questioning what the rest of the dreary, solitary masses did with their time or to whom they confided. And she didn't like it, couldn't take it. She was too energetic to find solace in a book, too young to enjoy stretched-out hours of tranquility. She craved movement and laughter and fun. And all she had was a lump of cold, hard solitude.

Boredom was not for her, idleness a danger to a young girl nearly shaking with life. She had tried to find something to do. She had walked around the hotel lobby, she had made an effort to talk with Rebekkah, the slender, chestnut-toned maid who apparently knew everything about Charleston and its people, according to Rhett, but who deigned not to share anything with Scarlett, she had even attempted to write a letter to her mother. Nothing would take.

The clouds rolling in from the coast had kept her inside for the day, or she would have braved the chilly shoulders and marched through town. Out of sheer dullness, she had gorged herself on everything on the hotel menu, ordering a banquet fit for a king and all his subjects. The food had been delicious, and she had packed as much of it into her stomach as she could possibly fit, but it had left her with a bloated belly and a bitter aftertaste.

The evening had worn on in this soft, listless way, broken up only by the brief, thunderous storm. After helping Scarlett out of her dress and into her nightgown and robe, even Rebekkah had excused herself and disappeared to the far reaches of the hotel, making Scarlett's abandonment complete. Rhett had promised her he wouldn't be too long, but he hadn't promised her when he would return.

It had been hours since he had carried her—against her protests—all through the gilded lobby and up the stairs to their room. That little antic by him had been too much for her and she had steamed at him for the half hour he had remained. She had assumed he might be obnoxious, had known he would be odious, but she had been unprepared for his evident disregard for all things ordinary. Still, as the minutes of isolation had stuttered by, she had started to wish for him to come back. He was better than no one.

She had been staring off into the distance for a while, drumming her fingers on the balcony's ledge and tapping her feet to a melody running through her mind, when she heard him enter the room. He chuckled, his deep voice mumbling something she couldn't make out, and called her name. A shiver that had nothing to do with the weather shot up her back and she twirled around to greet him.

He had a biscuit halfway to his mouth when he noticed her. His hand stopped and he looked at her from top to bottom, his bold gaze lingering on her legs. She glanced down and blushed at how her nightgown clung to her body, uncertainly stepping back into the room.

He took a bite and slowly chewed, his unreadable eyes never wavering from her face. She hugged her robe and waited, swiveling her gaze between him and the fireplace. She had wanted him to return, but now that he was here, she wasn't so sure. She had been so bored and desperate for some distraction all afternoon and evening, depressed by the unfriendly welcome in Charleston, and still reeling from all the other unwanted changes in her life, that she had forgotten to worry about what would actually happen when Rhett came back to their room. Her tongue suddenly felt dry, her skin clammy, and the feast in her stomach sloshed around, threatening to come back up.

Rhett smirked, as though he had read her mind as easily as he had read her body, and popped the rest of the biscuit into his mouth. "I was ready to apologize that you had to wait for supper, but I see you availed yourself of enough food to feed the troops—for both sides."

She wiped the perspiration from off her forehead, relieved, irritated, and, if she was entirely honest, a little disappointed, by his caustic hello. She pulled the collar of her wrapper closer to her neck, groping for some retort and was forced to settle for the truth.

"I saved some for you."

He glanced down at the messy table. "Yes, thank you for your crumbs Mrs. Dives."

"Well, you can't have expected me to starve for you, can you?"

"Starve? You were eating honeycakes when I left. I'd hate to think how much food you would devour if I left you alone for an entire day. Keep eating like this and I'll have to call in the calvary—to warn them that their food stores are in danger."

She glowered, and he laughed. Dusting off his fingertips, he brushed past her and sank down into a large chintz chair turned toward the fire.

"Come, have a seat Scarlett. You must be exhausted."

She squared her shoulders and sat down in the chair across from him, trying to appear as cool and unbothered as he seemed. She didn't want to start their evening off with a spat. From their first conversation together, he had managed to rankle her good moods, to contort them into something twisted and unrefined. Breathing down her temper, she watched him pour himself a drink from a decanter resting on the stand next to him. He threw the brandy cleanly back and then, with a wink, titled the tumbler in her direction.

"Care for a nightcap?"

"I would never!"

"You must be curious. Go on. I won't judge you. It might even do you some good. Who knows?"

"No, thank you," she elegantly refused.

He shrugged and poured himself another drink. "Your loss."

Sipping from it slowly, he watched her from over the rim of his glass, his eyes glinting with amber and gold from his drink and the firelight. Scarlett pleated the edges of her robe and straightened her back, trying not to wriggle too much under his quiet scrutiny. She had never met a man like him, and something visceral tugged her towards him, but despite his patience last night, or his tenderness this morning, from arms length away, she viewed him only as a mystery, and not one she was particularly interested in solving. She didn't think it was normal, or right, that a single look from him could simultaneously drench her in sweat and parch her throat. Rhett laughed quietly and she jumped at the sound.

"Does your pensive silence mean you missed me?" he asked, swirling the contents of his glass and looking up at her from beneath his heavy brow.

"What?"

"Your silence must mean something. For the brief time I've known you—and I know you better than you would think or time would suggest—you're only ever quiet like this when you're plotting or moping."

"I am not. I mean, I like quiet."

"Really?"

"Yes. I'm not some chattering ninny."

"True, you're not particularly talkative, but nor are you especially contemplative. You're quiet when you're bored or uninterested, like you were earlier today during my tour of Charleston, and when that happens your eyes just sort of gloss over and look like two pristine ponds of green water. But when you're sulking, or even better, when you're scheming, the most delicious gleam suffuses them. I first saw it at the barbecue, when you seduced every man there while pining for the only man you actually wanted to seduce. I was amused no one else noticed. You'd be a terrible poker player. Your eyes are dead giveaways to your thoughts."

"And what about now?" she sneered, riled by his smooth, sharp musings into her mind. "What are my eyes telling you this time?"

He smiled, swilled down the rest of his drink, and setting it aside, stood up. With his hands slid casually inside his pants pockets, he strode right up to her and stared down.

"Stay away," he said softly.

There was something in his gaze and voice that made her heart race, and changed her burning anger into a burning heat. She didn't know what he would do next. She didn't know if she wanted him to do anything. But when he began to undo his tie, she knew her world was about to change and she started to tremble. The hairs on her skin rose, each leisurely loop stealing away her breath, as he unhurriedly slipped off his tie and dropped it onto the floor.

Slowly he knelt down in front of her, unbuttoning his shirt and gliding his gaze from her hair down to her slippers. Looking back into her face, he reached out his hand and caressed her cheek.

"Whatever you do," he urged, "don't close your eyes."

His hand slid around to the back of her neck, her skin melted, and he drew her to him.

_Note-I'm treating myself more than I should. So I've had to ask myself, "When did Rhett really fall in love with Scarlett?" What do you think? Thanks for the reviews. Cheers._


	4. Chapter 4

A gust of wind danced across the back of Scarlett's leg, the soft current slipping through the twisted blankets to her bare skin. Her lips curved into a faint smile and before opening her eyes, she stretched out her arm. Her hand caught hold of empty sheets and air, and she bolted upright. Rhett was gone.

She stared down at where he had slept, the crush of his body still contouring the bed, and her face bled red. Last night hadn't been a dream. She trailed her gaze over the jumble of sheets and blankets to her own exposed body. Horrified, she scrambled off the mattress, snatched up the discarded nightgown from the floor, and shimmied into it with the slickness of rain on ice.

She panted and sank down into a chair in front of the balcony doors. Streaks of sunlight blasted into the room and she blinked at the brightness, her mind working a hundred times faster than her eyes. Every thing that had happened last night tore through her memory—the lashing, insistent kisses, the patient, gentle caresses, his rough, experienced hands on her smooth, untouched body, his gruff voice as he demanded her not to turn aside, not to look away, not to blink, and woven into every moment and breath, his unyielding, depthless eyes as they coaxed and commanded her, pulling her under his control and drowning her in his heat.

She took a long, deep breath. It was as if she had just come up for air, her lungs filled with the tidal wave that had tried to overcome her. Even her lips tasted of salt. How peculiar. The world was peculiar—every thing looked the same and every thing looked different. The doors to the unknown had been ripped open and she was suddenly staring at the same view, but through the other side of the entrance.

For years she had known that something happened between a husband and wife to create a baby. Growing up in the rural hills of Georgia, she had seen animals obscenely quiver against another beast, but she had never tied those crude couplings to what humans did to multiply. Last night, some of it had been mortifyingly messy and stingingly painful, and she remembered being momentarily appalled when she had realized that her angelic mother had been involved with something so barbaric. But then Rhett would touch her, causing her to moan, drawing a sigh from her lips and stoking a fire in her belly she had never known existed, and she would feel that nothing had ever felt as natural or as sacred as his flesh rubbing against her own.

And that feeling frightened her, more than anything ever had, more than hearing his voice issue out from the depths of the sofa after her most humiliating moment, more than marrying him, or leaving her home and family, more than even the act of giving her body over to him. It had felt so right to lie in his arms, to follow him into a world unknown to her. His hoarse whispers of "Sweet, sweet my darling" echoed in her ears. The eagerness of his kisses popped over her tongue. Even now, his power over her made her tremble, and with her heart hammering, hammering to be touched by him again, hammering to understand the desires he had provoked in her, hammering with an awakening she was too young and naïve to appreciate, she despised him.

These new, astonishing sensations disconcerted her as much as they excited her, and so she became angry, angry with herself, angry with her betraying body, and angry at Rhett. She wouldn't be a fool and blindly throw herself at another man she didn't understand—she had learned her lesson. The fox of wrath nipped at her, gnawing at her insides and obscuring the true source of her anger.

The light breeze flowed in from a cracked-open window. The air raced across her arms and all of her frustration oozed out of her, the perplexing, disturbing remembrance of desire flooding in to steal its place.

With the crispness and light of morning on her skin, Scarlett didn't know what to think or what to trust. She knew her mother had shared a bed with her father, but she doubted her mother had ever experienced the same deep, throbbing ecstasy that had erupted in her as she had reveled in Rhett's embrace last night. Her mother was too good and pure to ever have the same longing, the same urge to have the whole, carnal thing repeated over and over again. And Scarlett didn't know if that made her somehow unworthy of the heaven she knew Ellen would one day inhabit. On a superstitious whim, she crossed herself and tried to shake all these warring emotions of virtue and vice away.

At that moment the suite door opened and Scarlett whipped her head up and around. Her giddy panic blew out of her and she watched Rebekkah gracefully weave her way toward her, balancing a steaming breakfast tray on one hand and carrying a dress in the other. Scarlett's gaze swung between the delicious smelling food—fragrant, fresh coffee, cooked bacon and hot cakes dripping with honey—and the gorgeous, lush green taffeta dress.

"Is that all for me?" Scarlett cried, swiveling around in her chair and snatching a strip of bacon before Rebekkah had placed the tray on the table beside her. "The dress is absolutely darling."

"Mornin' Miz Scarlett," was all Rebekkah said.

She hung the dress on the armoire, brushing it down with her palm. Her sharp, ebony eyes swiftly scanned the room, seeing everything and, without being told, knowing more about what had happened last night than Scarlett did. She began tidying up, her movements sure and quick, her fast hands and agile body turning the chore into a dance. She pushed the leftover cart from supper out into the hall, made the bed, drew the drapes and swept up the carpets in fluid, waltz-like motions.

Scarlett chewed on the gristly part of her second bacon strip, a little embarrassed and mollified. There was something in Rebekkah's regal air that reminded her of Dilcey. She held her head high, and her shoulders straight. She could have been thirty or sixty, her creamy skin blemishless and taut, almost the color of hazel in this golden morning light. Her accent was thick and elegant, a blend of the vernacular of her people and the nasal drawl of stuffy parlor rooms. But there was something else that was familiar about Rebekkah, something Scarlett couldn't quite put her finger on.

"Rebekkah, have we met before?" Scarlett asked, turning on her brightest smile and setting her coffee cup down. She wasn't fool enough to think she didn't need Rebekkah on her side, for however long she was near by. "Have you ever been to Georgia?"

"No ma'am."

"No you haven't been to Georgia or no we haven't met before?"

"Neither, ma'am."

Rebekkah finished straightening the fluffing the pillows on the sofa and stood up, erect as a pine tree. She folded her hands and ran her expert gaze up and down Scarlett's body.

"Do you wanna wait a bit, or do you think you kin fit into your stays Miz Scarlett? This dress is measured for seventeen inches."

"That depends on you, Rebekkah. My Mammy could get me to sixteen inches if need be, even after eating a whole sweet potato and two cuts of smoked ham."

"I kin always do what I need to do, ma'am."

"I believe that."

For the first time, Rebekkah's face broke into a smile, revealing wrinkles and laugh marks Scarlett hadn't been able to notice before, but could have sworn she'd seen before. Rebekkah's fleeting break from austerity wasn't enough to jog Scarlett's memory free of its mist, though. The raspberry-chocolate mouth almost immediately fell into bland lines and she started to help Scarlett into her stays and dress. And Scarlett all but forgot that anything existed outside of easy-draping necklines and criss-crossed bodices.

"Are we going somewhere?" Scarlett asked a half hour later, twirling in the long mirror and admiring how the green of the dress perfectly matched her eyes.

"I kin take you around Charleston. I know it well."

"Oh, that would be fine." She stopped preening and looked up at Rebekkah. A dress this pretty should be seen. "Do you know when Mr. Butler will be back?"

"You mean Cap'ain Butler?"

Scarlett frowned. She didn't know why, but she hadn't realized that Rhett was considered a captain. But that had been silly of her. She rolled the name around on her tongue. Oh! She liked the sound of that. A pride that had nothing to do with her planted itself in her breast. The wife of a captain would demand respect. The wife of a captain could show all those busybody, too-smart-for-their-own britches Charlestonians a thing or two. Her green eyes positively sparked, a sweet, reckless defiance lighting up her face. This morning every emotion that pulsed within her, no matter how brief or small, was raw, every nerve of her body and heart frayed open at the ends.

"Yes, yes, will Captain Butler be back soon? I would hate to miss him."

"I dunno, ma'am. I 'sepct his has loads to do. He got to be off in a few days, don't he?"

Scarlett perked up, a bristle of annoyance running up against her happy mood. She snatched her gloves up from off the dresser and briskly tugged them on.

"Off? It must have slipped my mind, and his apparently—where exactly is my husband going?"

Rebekkah raised her thick eyebrows. "To England. I'm sure he was plannin' on tellin' you right quick."

Scarlett clenched her hands, digging her nails into the lace. England? He was abandoning her in this new town, with no friends, and without any warning? How dare he! Hot words bubbled to her mouth, but she squelched them. It wasn't Rebekkah's fault Rhett had kept things from her. Mammy's voice rang in her mind, the chime that sugar catches more flies than vinegar. She bit back the torrent of wrath and swallowed it down.

"Is there anything else you can think of that he might have forgotten to tell me?"

"Not really, 'cept he done told me to take you round the town and show you some of the finer parts of Charleston. I can't say when he'll be back to the hotel. I never make assumptions ef I kin help it, 'specially 'bout Mista' Rhett."

"Mister Rhett? And do you know Mister Rhett all that well? How long has Captain Butler been staying at this hotel?"

Rebekkah pursed her full lips. "I dunno how long he been stayin' here. I wish I could be of more help. I jes' got here four days befor' you."

"Four days? But, but don't you belong to the hotel?"

Rebekkah's face turned to stone, but she answered in the same, measured, melodious voice. "I s'pose you might say, Miz' Scarlett, that I belong to you. Mista' Rhett done bought me five days ago, paid a heap o' money, too, if you was curious."

Scarlett's nostrils flared. She could not curb her wrath any longer, she had never been good at bridling her temper, and Rebekkah with her roundabout, impudent answers had dug underneath her skin, burrowing straight through to her festering fury. It was a fury so much the worse after last night, after he had opened her up only to leave her, lying there alone and exposed. She stomped her foot and spluttered, her eyes snapping and her body shaking.

"Great balls of fire! I don't care how much you cost. I want to know what else you know about my husband—what else you know about me! Tell me or I'll take a strap to you and sell you back to where you came from, you hear?"

Rebekkah did not flinch or blink, but silently, coolly waited until Scarlett spun away. She waited long enough for Scarlett to glare back at her a few times, to pace the room, her skirts swinging angrily and her neck dripping with sweat, for Scarlett to finally, childishly flop down onto the bed and mope up at her.

"I wasn't goin' to tell you, cause I didn' think it was my place, but I reckon I got the right to tell you now. Mista' Rhett did tell me somethin' 'bout you—'side from the fact that you gots yourself a fine ol' temper—he done tol' me when he bought me—bought me off of his daddy who he hadn' seen in more years than you been alive—that he didn' know what he was goin' to do with Pa and Ma O'Hara's daughter. Now I don' know why Mista' Rhett hasn' seen fit to tell you 'bout his life. I don' know why he married you. I have my suspicions. But, Miz' Scarlett, I will tell you, that ef you ever threaten me 'gain like that, I'll tell Mista' Rhett and I guarantee you, he'll bullwhip you sooner than he ever gonna bullwhip me."

With that, Rebekkah turned around, swiped up the cold tray, and marched over to the door. "I'll be downstairs in the lobby when you ready."

Scarlett stared after her, dumbstruck and barely breathing. She suddenly knew why Rebekkah seemed so familiar. Those eyes! That grin! They weren't from her past, but from her very near and abruptly damaged present. Scarlett had thought it odd when Ellen had told her on the eve of her wedding that Rhett had said she needn't bring anybody from Tara, not even Prissy to help out on the train. But her brain had been bogged down by so many other things these last few days that she hadn't had time to wonder at it. Now she would never wonder again.

A noxious sickness swirled in Scarlett's gut. She wanted wretch onto the carpet, curl up into a ball, and cry. But she couldn't do that—she couldn't just give up. She had given up too much already. She pulled herself up off the bed, dragged her feet across the floor and slowly, deliberately opened the door. Her chin quivered slightly, the rest of her face as still as glass. She wouldn't think about anything now. She wouldn't think about last night. It must have been a dream, some strange, beautiful dream. She didn't even remember falling asleep afterwards. She only remembered—knew she would always remember—waking up.

_Thanks for the reviews._


	5. Chapter 5

_(Consider this a continuation of chapter 4...)_

_~Souffle~_

Rebekkah dragged Scarlett all around Charleston that day, from the noisy, vibrant town square to the pungent wharf, and back through street and street of stone walls. The unforgiving spring sun bore down upon her, burning the tip of her nose and the tender skin along her collarbones. The cobblestones pushed against the thin soles of her boots, rubbing blisters onto her soft heels. Rebekkah plowed forward, unaware of or indifferent to her discomfort. As they curved their way along a pebbled path with a sparkling ocean view, a sharp rock jammed through Scarlett's shoe leather and she squealed. Not bothering to slow down, Rebekkah peeked at her and barely suppressed a smirk.

"Come along, Miz' Scarlett," she commanded. "We best be on our way. We got lots more to see 'fore we done. I don' wanna disappoint Mista' Rhett when he ask me ef you received the true Charleston welcome."

Rebekkah strolled on without a backward glance and Scarlett hobbled after her, a thick hatred smothering her pain. She was sick and tired of everything in this miserable, mean town, and wanted to rage at everyone, especially this high and mighty monster who hadn't yet broken a sweat and had the audacity to sneer at her. But reining in all her annoyance, she resisted the urge to surrender and demand to go back to the hotel. She refused to show any sign of weakness to this pompous she-devil. Whoever this Rebekkah was, wherever she came from, and whomever she belonged to—she would not make Scarlett turn and hide with her tail between her legs.

And so, Scarlett endured, forcing herself to walk with her normal sway—each step excruciatingly agonizing—and to simper and dimple at the few Charlestonians who didn't know who she was, didn't care, or had forgotten, that number seeming to multiply as she flounced through the town.

"We must not cut as striking a pair as Rhett and I did yesterday," she thought, curtsying to an elderly gentleman who had readily tipped his hat at her. "They don't connect me with scandal."

Scarlett accepted her assumption as fact, allowing it to embolden her, to raise her confidence and her chin, never realizing the full truth of the matter—that even stodgy Charlestonians, the men in particular—couldn't squash the urge to study that arresting, intense face, to catch more than a sidelong glimpse of the alluring eyes and dazzling smile. Blindly uninterested, as oblivious to the unseen motivations of the people around her as she was to the pressures and forces behind the fast-approaching war, Scarlett took the uptake in kindness as the one, small reprieve during her sluggish trek.

When she finally returned to the hotel, when Rebekkah finally returned her, her tongue was leached of moisture, her back ached, and her legs throbbed, but she knew she had beaten Rebekkah, knew she had passed whatever test the irksome woman had decided to inflict upon her. She saw a glimmer of respect begrudgingly appear in Rebekkah's gaze, heard the faintest hint of kindness leak into her perfunctory voice. But she was too tired to care, at least for now.

"Here child, let me take off them terrible boots," she said, gently leading Scarlett by the elbow and sitting her on a chair. "And get you in some looser clothin'."

Scarlett allowed herself to be pampered, her sore limbs aching with weariness. Rebekkah started humming a throaty melody as she eased off Scarlett's boots and helped her out of her dress—the sight of the tattered hems making Scarlett glare and Rebekkah almost flinch.

"I'm a fine mender," she mumbled, that soft, sad song rising up again from her throat.

Scarlett's annoyance withered into the musical void. She closed her eyes and let Rebekkah's low voice steel over her, the strong, sure hands wiping the dust off her face, slathering some cooling balm on her feet, and smearing buttermilk cream on her over-warmed flesh. The last thing that went was Scarlett's stays, and she took in a long, luxurious breath, sighing as fresh air slithered in between her unrestricted breasts and down her belly.

"Now you get some rest, ma'am," Rebekkah urged, turning down the blankets and patting the bed. "I done wore you out today, but I promise. I won' do it again."

Scarlett yawned, tossing her hair carelessly behind her shoulder, and climbed into the bed. Rebekkah laid one of Scarlett's light, cotton nightgowns on the mattress beside her and slipped out of the room with as much sound as a ghost, draping the street-splattered dress across her arm.

She stared down at her nightgown, fingering the worn edges of the tiny cap sleeve. The last time she had worn this was two nights before her wedding. That seemed a lifetime ago. It was a lifetime ago. Sometime between that twisting train ride and the taxing march through Charleston today, she had changed. She was still young and selfish and inexperienced, but she had already begun to discover that well of strength and resilience that would carry her through life, to learn that she had a will not only to survive, but to thrive, to know that she could trust herself—and apart from her mother and, possibly Mammy—no one else.

The realization saddened her, her drowsiness coloring her vision with even bluer hues. She missed her mother and Mammy, yearned for the nearness of another soul, the comfort of a touch that didn't also terrorize her with unnerving desires. Rebekkah could not be a substitute for what she had left behind. Rebekkah was something other, something upsetting and distressing in her own right. All those nauseating thoughts that Scarlett had kept at bay while she had brazenly hiked through town crashed through to the fore of her mind.

Before this morning's clap of awareness, Scarlett had known that slaves like Rebekkah existed, slaves who looked more like the men who owned the cotton than the men who picked the cotton. These souls were phantoms, materializing from the darkest corners of the privileged, glittery world she grew up in. These were shames of the husbands so great that not even behind solid bedroom doors or in hushed voices between lavender-clad matrons were they mentioned. The eyes of the silent wives were fixed on the bright and glorious, the charming and endurable, willfully blind to the ugly truth. But never ignorant of it, never fully forgetful of it.

Scarlett had known, had heard theses rumors, but until Rebekkah, it had never stared her in the face and challenged her. And now she would have to partake of the bitterness daily. Now she would have to relive the infamy of someone else's sins every time she wanted her hair curled or her corset cinched. The reality of Rebekkah's origins clawed at her, slashing at Scarlett's sense of the good and beautiful

The fact that Rhett could not be the father, Rebekkah's age made that impossible, did little to sponge the vinegar from the wound. That worry was not what had sickened Scarlett this morning, what had been festering in her mind ever since, gouging out holes in the thin fabric of her relationship with her mysterious husband. Rebekkah was not Rhett's offspring, but she was his blood, and Scarlett wanted to know, felt the continuous scratching in her brain of the _need_ to know: What else might be in Rhett's blood?

Clearly he must resemble his father—have his dark hair and eyes, his toothy smile, and his thin, straight nose. Those must be Butler traits. They were so defined, so blatantly inherited. But what else were Butler men prone to do? Rhett had already told her, blithely unashamedly, that he had frequented low women.? Would he continue to visit brothels, to fall or force himself onto any woman if he desired her? And if he did—what would Scarlett do about it? Could she hold her head high and pretend not to care?

After last night, she didn't think that would be possible. Sharing something she considered her own, even if she didn't love it, even if it had only been lent to her, or even if she hated it, had never been something she could happily do. Complete possession was always her mindset. As a child, whenever she had received a gift, no matter how trifling or abhorrent she had deemed it, she would still refuse to let Suellen or Careen play with it, until she had broken it or it was a tarnished beyond repair.

Whatever she felt about Rhett, whatever lurked in her heart, she considered him hers. She wasn't willing to share him. But he wasn't a toy, and he wasn't a boy that she could manipulate, either. He was a man she didn't understand. He was a man who might be a man just like his father. Something moved in her veins at the thought of him being with any woman—willing or unwilling—other than herself again. It was vicious and vile, a dormant serpent that would rise up and strike, aiming to kill and wreak vengeance.

The violence of the emotion startled her and she gripped at the bed, her fingers twisting the nightgown into her palm. She couldn't think like that. She'd scream if she thought like that. She must learn to forget it—for she knew, she could never bring it up with Rhett. Somehow it would make her less of a lady, less like her mother. And she couldn't lose that hope of one day becoming like her mother. To lose that hope would be the same as losing her past, of losing Ellen. Oh no, she wouldn't lose all that—she wouldn't lose herself. Not for Rhett. Not for anyone.

Scarlett lifted the nightgown and pressed it into her face. Her nostrils filled up with the scents of pine and Mammy's soap and her mother's lemon verbena perfume. She fell back onto the bed, hugging it to her bosom. The afternoon was warm, but she pulled the sheets up to her chin, the clean fabric cooling her fevered skin. Oblong shadows crept across the floor towards her and her eyes began to droop. With the nightgown tucked under her cheek, she instantly fell asleep, the smells and memories of home, of Tara, of the source of her strength, saturating her senses and mind.

_~Souffle~_

That endless, stuffy afternoon, it was no surprise that she had a dream about home. It started out like a dream she used to have as a young girl—with her, a child, standing on the porch in her mother's too long, too big dress, the hoop skirt bubbling around her and pushing up to her small, undefined chest. When she had been young, her mother would then come out of the house and gently scold her for borrowing her clothes without asking, and Scarlett would break down and cry, apologizing at the top of her lungs that she was naughty and not good like her mother.

But this time, when Ellen came out, feathery and pleasant as a bird, the child Scarlett didn't dissolve into tears, she calmly stared at her mother, and refused to feel ashamed.

"Fiddle-dee-dee, mother," she giggled, the sound echoing in the stillness of the dream world. "I know things that you'll never understand."

And then to her horror and delight, her limbs started to stretch out, her hips to widen, and her breasts to expand. She watched in wonder as her body instantly transformed from girl to woman, and with eyes wide she slowly turned her head back to her mother, only Ellen wasn't standing at her side—Rebekkah was.

"What you think you understand? You still a girl."

Rebekkah shook her head, her lips turned down in a familiar mock frown. Scarlett was on the verge of giving her some smart retort when she heard something rumble, and quickly cast her eyes out over the cotton fields.

Dark peaks of thunder clouds were rolling out across the sky faster than she had ever seen. The low growl on the horizon was quickly growing into a terrible, earth-shattering roar. A flash of lightning split through the air and a wall of rain plummeted down. The red clay became a great, rushing red river, the spindly pines shooting up in the distance bent wildly back and forth, and the cotton fields flooded into cotton swamps.

Water sliced sideways under the porch and pelted Scarlett. She whipped her head back to where her mother had been, to where Rebekkah had stood, but no one was there now. She lifted her sodden skirts and tried to go into the house, but the door was locked. She jiggled at the knob and pounded at the door, blinking the splashes of rain out of her eyes and yelling with all the breath she possessed. No one could hear her above the howling of the wind. She gave up and rested her forehead against her hand, leaning against the locked door.

"I won't be licked," she said in a low voice. "I won't surrender."

She lifted her head, turned around, and with her eyes burning, faced the storm.

_Note: Thanks for the reviews. Oh, Rebekkah, Rebekkah._


	6. Chapter 6

Scarlett woke up, drenched in sweat, out of breath, and disoriented. She was surrounded by almost complete darkness, clutching something soft against her chest, and lying on an unfamiliar bed. She stayed there, her body rigid with shock and her mind groggy with sleep, until she heard the muffled cough of a man and her nose tingled with the spicy scent of a cigar and the whiff of burning wood.

Slowly she sat up, her hair falling across her shoulders, and looked toward the fireplace. Rhett's outline wavered in the hazy, smoky glow. He switched between lifting a glowing cigar to his lips and a glass that scintillated with flecks of yellow light. A mixture of dread and sleepiness overlaid her vision. She watched him for awhile, without him knowing. The chill of the dream lingered on her skin and brain, and Scarlett couldn't remember why she had been mad at him, and couldn't muster the energy to search her memory. She recalled his touch, his warmth, the strength of his arms as they enfolded her last night.

Lowering her gaze to the nightgown still fisted in her hands, she hesitated and then dropped it to the ground. She didn't know what time it was, or how long she had been asleep. Rebekkah must have come back at some point because a wrapper was strewn across the bottom of the bed. She tossed the covers off, throwing on the wrapper as she stood, and boldly walked toward Rhett.

His eyes flicked her way and her blood roused with trepidation. She paused, wondering why she hadn't just stayed in bed. He lazily sucked on his cigar and tapped the ashes into a tray beside him, glancing at her again. She saw his white teeth glint, his mouth twisted into that casual leer, and took the final steps to the chair across from him.

The fire's angular shadows and uneven light obscured some of his face, but Scarlett could now perceive the dusting of stubble on his jaw and the crescents of fatigue underneath his eyes. His exhaustion made her relax a little more into her chair, her understanding of him too dim to sense the latency of his power over her.

"Good morning," he drawled. "I hope I didn't wake you."

"Good morning? What time is it?"

"Must be close to four. I heard the three o'clock bell chime when I opened the lobby doors."

"Four in the morning? I…I haven't slept through supper like that since I was nine or ten—and that's only because I fell off a tree and landed flat on my stomach."

"Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are," he quoted, blowing out a plume of smoke. "Nothing comes between you and your food, does it?"

She shrugged, unbothered by his taunt. The rules about how an unmarried lady should and shouldn't eat had always seemed impractical to her. In fact, all the rules about what a single lady in pursuit of a bachelor should and shouldn't do had all seemed ludicrously unnatural to her. And now that they no longer applied to her, she didn't mind deriding them, starting with the food habits.

"Why shouldn't I like to eat?" she asked tartly. "Girls only pretend not to have an appetite because men are silly and don't know what they want."

Rhett laughed and pitched the cigar into the grate. "Is that so? Pray enlighten me."

"Of course it's so. Men think they want all sorts of things—fainting spells at every turn, "Oh aren't you wonderful" after they've shot a 'possum for the hundredth time in their lives, and worst of all, women who turn their noses up at anything that tastes good. I never understood why a girl had to be so ridiculous to catch a husband. Well, I never fainted, and in the end, it didn't matter if I nibbled like a sparrow or gobbled like a turkey at a barbecue. I still caught a husband, almost two."

"Just not quite the one you wanted, if memory serves me right."

"Oh, you would bring that up. Well, Ashley's the biggest cad of all. He lacked the gumption to marry anyone but frail, mealy Melanie Hamilton, who I swear I never saw eat more than two bites put together at any public gathering. Gracious! What fool man actually wants a wife who hates sitting at meals with him?"

"I can't speak for other men, and certainly not for Mr. Wilkes, but I wouldn't mind a wife who hated sitting at meals, at least by herself."

"Saints preserve us! Are you going to go on about that again? I have one supper by myself and you act like some wounded puppy that didn't get enough scraps at the table. You talk a big game about freeing me from my chains and saving me from some fantastic prison, but you're just as hypocritical as the rest of the husbands who claim to want a girl who can't stand to put a fork to her mouth and doesn't have more than just cotton between her ears, but expect the same girl to be a wife who has enough brains to run a plantation and have the health to pop out a baby every year."

"I will give your crude comments about the supposed heart's desires of mankind the silence they deserve, adding only my own personal affront at being called a hypocrite and a wounded puppy in the same breath. I don't know which offends me more."

Scarlett tapped the rope from her wrapper against her leg and rolled her eyes. "Ha! If I've offended you, it's no less than you deserve."

"That's probably true, but you're in the middle of a very huffy—and might I add very attractive—tirade, so I'm sure you have something specific in mind, some precise wrongdoing you're peeved about, beyond the unjust diet restrictions we southern men place upon our southern women. You can't be that much of a glutton. What else has piqued your ire, my lovely epicure?"

"Your lovely what?"

"My lovely simpleton, for all that it matters now. Don't evade my question. What's the real bee in your bonnet?"

Rhett grinned, praising and daring her all at once. High on the shallow wrath that had sprung up, she found it hard not to laugh right back at him. A dimple appeared and vanished on her cheek. Involuntarily she let her guard down more. Flustered and starving from all her talk of food, she still couldn't remember what was irritating her so, until the question slipped out and a note of petulance seeped into her tone, betraying her against her will.

"You were gone all day, even before breakfast. Why'd you get back only an hour ago Rhett?"

His tired eyes instantly flashed with an alertness that made her flush and she looked down, pinning the wrapper tighter across her knees. A spasm of bewildering pleasure clutched at her heart—so vigorously that it might have been pain.

"Dare I hope you had intended on waiting to eat supper with me tonight—before you fell sleep?"

"You may dare hope whatever you like," she said, her nostrils distending with forced contempt and her face flipping up. "But that doesn't mean it is any more likely to be true."

"Ah," he sighed with mock regret. "To have you dash yet another hope. How unwise of you to so hastily crush my dreams. I was going to flout convention by feeding you, and offer you the last of the supper that I stole from the kitchens. But alas, your lack of consideration leaves me feeling ungenerous."

"I'm not hungry," she declared, with a disdain that would have made Mammy proud.

"Well, in that case…"

Brandishing his arm with the flare of a bull fighter, he reached down by his feet to a plate that Scarlett hadn't noticed and set it on his lap. The meal wasn't much—just a dry, cold cut sandwich and a thin triangle of peach pie—but her stomach lurched with hunger at the sight of it. His eyes twinkled when he picked up the sandwich and bit into it with indecent relish.

Scarlett's eyes quivered with exasperation and she scooted up to the edge of her chair, fully expecting him to hand the plate over to her now that he had poked fun at her voraciousness, but he just winked at her. And then he took another bite and another, prolonging his rude joke with exaggerated enjoyment, savoring each bite like it was the most delectable food he'd ever eaten, licking his lips, and sighing heavily. The sandwich was just about gone, but he set it down, picked up the piece of pie—and she cracked. Salivating and chomping at the bit in more ways than one, indignant that he always made her feel like a ravenous imbecile, she strode across the narrow space between their two chairs and yanked the plate off his lap, and the pie directly out of his hands.

"You already finished my sandwich," she fumed, dropping the pie onto the plate and flicking her peach-covered fingers in his face. "I'll thank you not to touch my dessert, too."

She twirled away, with an insolent, heady smirk on her lips and a bounce to her hips, but didn't get very far. A sharp tug to her wrapper stopped her feet and wrenched her backwards. The plate flipped into the air, the pie and sandwich crust flying down with it, as her legs collapsed and she flailed onto Rhett's lap.

Her hair tumbling everywhere, she flung him a look of shocked outrage, which immediately evaporated under his gaze. Lust leaped out of his black eyes, as real and scorching as any flame. The emptiness in her stomach quickly caved into a solid mass of nervous desire. Panic and anticipation sped in her veins. She wanted to push him off. She wanted to pull him near.

Rhett thumbed the peach drippings off his face and braced his arms around her, the muscles rippling distractingly against her own arms.

"Red-hot little rebel, aren't you?"

"Let me go."

"I don't think I can.""

"Can't or won't?"

"Does it matter to you—if it does, I might tell you."

"Why would it matter to me?"

He dipped his head down, his lips tickling her earlobe and his stubble scratching her cheek. "You can tell me if you missed me. You are my bride, after all, and this is our honeymoon."

"I…I…"

His hand slid under her wrapper, under her pantaloons and started inching up her leg. She couldn't think. She could barely move. He pressed his mouth along her jaw, down her neck and onto the delicate, sunburned skin by her collarbone, leisurely kisses of the faintest contact.

"I am sorry I had to leave, but war waits for no man, or woman. Not even you." He pulled back suddenly, his eyes heavy with desire. "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever held in my arms. I didn't want to let you go this morning."

She searched his swarthy face, wondering what his eyes were trying to tell her and why his voice had roughened. His roaming hand rested limply on her thigh, a searing iron on her flesh. She sucked back her need and sucked in her breath.

"You…you didn't have to. You could have waited for me to wake up."

"Could I have?" he asked softly. "Until marrying you, I never had to wrestle with angels or devils. I just took what I wanted and to heaven or hell with the rest. Now I have to weigh my options, figure out what I'm supposed to do with the granddaughter of a French aristocrat and the daughter of an Irish peasant, all while her world's on the brink of burning to the ground and I'm on the verge of spinning my gold from its ashes."

His speech about civilizations incinerating and gold accruing ran through her, she hardly heard anything after he had uttered the word, daughter. That single word had slapped her with the force of a falling tree branch. Instantly she had remembered why she had been mad at him—before the truth about Rebekkah had clouded every other thought from her mind and the punishing day had beat her into a restive slumber—he'd complained about her to that demon woman and told the maid things he hadn't even told Scarlett, confiding in some self-righteous servant before he had discussed his plans with his wife.

Hot with wrath this time, the hot, unpredictable wrath he always provoked in her, she shoved him away and scrambled out of his lap. Her chest rocked with the violence of the passion racing out of her system and she sputtered at him, until her tongue latched onto her anger.

"You are a cold-hearted brute, Rhett Butler! I never asked for any of this. I never asked you to eavesdrop on me or to marry me or to waste any of your precious time worrying over what to do with me. Well, you needn't concern yourself with me another minute. Just go back to your stupid ship and sail to England or Halifax, or if you had any decency, sink your ship straight through to the bottom of the ocean, and I'll take my things and go back home tonight."

Rhett sprawled his long legs comfortably out and folded his hands over his chest. Something shifted in his expression, the flame in his gaze flickering. And when he spoke, the gruffness had flattened into complete exhaustion.

"Which of your aunts visited you this afternoon Scarlett? Was it your Aunt Eulalie?"

Scarlett felt like he'd just swiped the rug out from under her, and her tight mouth dropped wide open. "Aunt 'Lalie? What does—"

"Nothing," he smoothly interrupted. "I can tell from your face that your Aunt Eulalie, who happens to be my mother's best friend, you know, has not made good on her threat as of yet. She has nothing to do with your evident information on my travel plans. And you wouldn't have come up with England on your own. Now, your Aunt Pauline lives too far away and she wasn't nearly as adamant as her sister when they came to me about a week ago and tried to dissuade me from yoking you to my sinful wagon. None of my family would have visited you—Father wouldn't have allowed it. He nearly gutted me with a dinner spoon when I graced his doorstep and bought…Ah! Rebekkah told you! You must have made her mad. Do you mind satisfying my curiosity and telling me just what you did? She's not goaded very easily into breaking confidences. She's like me in that way—but you must have noticed she's like me in many ways. You're uneducated, not unintelligent."

Rhett finished, scratching his jaw, and Scarlett gaped at him, the sound of his knuckles against his stubble rasping as loud as gunfire in the silence of her stupor. Her brain was spinning madly around and her fury had completely deflated. With a bland boredom that had captivated her, Rhett had reeled off these familial facts; as though they weren't startling revelations that required some preface or intonation, conversing about secrets that southerners didn't confess on their deathbeds and uncovering skeletons that families buried in the graveyard alongside their deceased loved ones. She staggered back to her chair, and after opening and closing her mouth a few times, was able to speak.

"Rebekkah's…she really is your—"

"Yes," he answered before she had the chance to ask, refolding his hands. "Rebekkah's not exactly a well-kept secret, although I'm probably the only Butler with the lack of manners to talk about it. I figured even you had pieced that one together by now. You had, hadn't you?"

She did not reply. The devastation of his calmly delivered disclosures was weighting her down—clamping shut her lips. A touch of concern flared in his eyes.

"Answer me Scarlett. Truly I wasn't trying to shock you. You had figured it out on your own, hadn't you?"

His sudden apprehension for her delicacy of mind churned her hatred. A trickle of cold, impersonal disgust drew her up and smoothed her ruffled mood. How could he speak about such things so indifferently and inconstantly? There was something terribly wrong with him, something rotten in the bones.

"Yes," she said coolly. "Yes. Now can we please not discuss it any further? It's vulgar and obscene."

"Well, I am sorry you had to have it confirmed in such a way. I hadn't meant to spring it on you like that, but you must admit you deserved whatever blow an admission like that would deliver. You bruised my pride, and I bruised yours."

"You did nothing of the kind. You can't hurt me."

"Husbands, even if their wives dislike them as much as mine dislikes me, can always hurt their wives. Rebekkah is proof of that."

Scarlett jerked herself toward the waning fire. "I said I don't wish to talk about this. You should respect my request."

"And you should respect me. I'm not one of your country beaux, shaking in my boots over whether I've made you too mad to warrant a kiss at the end of the ball. I'll kiss you, and more, if and when I want to."

Scarlett gasped and whipped around to him, sputtering in outrage. "I wasn't making an idle threat. I'll pack my trunk tonight if you keep talking like that."

"And I'll unpack it tomorrow morning, with you watching from our bed. Don't make threats you can't follow through on, pet. It only leads to debts you can't pay."

Rhett hadn't moved, hadn't lifted one of his long, stretched-out legs or wiggled his gently-folded fingers. From his slightly tilted head to his shoeless feet, he appeared to personify graceful ease and disregard. But something in his voice had instantly put Scarlett on edge, the finest precipice between fear and ecstasy. She searched his inscrutable face, trying to see the intensity she had heard in his voice, wondering if her ears had played tricks on her or if her eyes were now deceiving her. She didn't know that the sensuality was always there, as ready to be unleashed in him as it was ready to be untapped in her.

Wanting to get away, she wound her arms tightly around her body and said, "I wouldn't have to make threats, if you acted like a gentleman and treated me like a lady."

"But you aren't a lady. I thought we covered this, weeks ago."

"Oh!" she cried. "How can—"

"Now don't get all up in arms again—I've been awake for almost a full day, sunrise to sunrise, and if you try my patience one more time I'm not sure what I'll do. I can't vouch for any bad behavior that might come from it. You can't decry the blockheads who think a woman needs to be a simpering, helpless wench one minute and then expect to be treated like one of those idiotic maidens in distress the next. Now you aren't a lady and I'm not a gentleman. And I believe that if you could learn to accept that, things would go much more smoothly for the both of us. But I can see from your sulky expression that you have no intention of paying any heed to my words, and every intention of pretending you're that docile, brainless belle that I saw you imitate with perfection at the barbecue. So I will not waste any more of my breath, at the moment, trying to persuade you otherwise. I will say, however, that whomever you wish to portray in public, or in private, my pretty hypocrite, I will still treat you as your true self—that indomitable spitfire who throws vases and threatens scoundrels to make good on sham proposals."

She tossed him a look of pure disdain, having let his words babble over her as an inconsequential brook. "Is there anything else you wish to tell me about myself?"

"Oh, you already have decided you know everything there is to know about you. I would like to tell you a few things about Rebekkah—"

"No," she spat. "We are not—"

"About Rebekkah, though," he continued on, deaf to her objection, "now that we've opened our own trite Pandora's box. She is meant to be your ally, Scarlett. But you're going to have to earn her trust and respect. I imagine she's not much different than that behemoth of a black woman I saw at our wedding—the one who ground her teeth at me whenever I came near her. Rebekkah's an old soul, and old souls require time to open their hearts to new souls. And you, darling, are as new as they come. But get in her good graces, and you have an ally for life. I'm sure you can do it. You have more charm than the law allows."

Scarlett's stony glower faltered at his unexpected compliment. Rhett noticed the softening of her expression and laughed.

"All you need is a little butter and sugar, and you turn into dough."

"Oh hush up."

"Soon enough, I'm exhausted." Rhett's voice took on the same even, boredom from earlier. "You need an ally here Scarlett, and you need Rebekkah. She knows everybody in this town and will keep you out of trouble—and from making too much trouble while I'm away."

"Away? Exactly where are you going away to?"

"England, as you know, and a few other places."

A quiver of bitterness slicked down her throat at his words. For the second time, the specter of Rebekkah's past had blocked out Rhett's other failings from her view. Plague that woman and plague him! Scarlett's hackles started to rise once more.

"Why didn't you tell me about England before?"

"The moment hadn't presented itself until tonight."

She waited for him to say more, but his flat, firm lips stayed closed.

"And why can't I go with you? I'm sure other captains take their wives."

"Women are bad luck on board, and so are cats. You're the most feline woman I've ever met. Before we could leave port, you'd bring the wrath of Neptune down onto my ship. I'm not willing to risk it. I'll take my chances and leave you here, with Rebekkah."

She chafed at his acerbic reply and thornily asked, "And who am I supposed to stay with? I'm not staying in this hotel, if that's what you're planning. Why, the least you could do before you abandon me is to send me back to Tara."

"While you're in town, you are welcome to stay here in this hotel, or if you are open to it, your Aunt Eulalie has said she'll take you in, so long as I'm out of the country. She still hopes to fold you under her wing and shield you from my fallen ways."

"You should have told me about my aunts. It wasn't right to make me believe I was as friendless in Charleston as you are."

"Why? Does it make you feel better to know that you have Charleston relations who braved the stink and filth of my ignominy to plead on your behalf?"

"You make anything to do with morals sound foul," she spat. "You'd probably twist scripture, if it suited your needs."

"I don't need to twist anything; the churches do that without any help from me. I don't consider myself a blasphemer, either, just because I don't believe that money's the root of all evil."

"Oh? And what is? I didn't know you were your own prophet."

"I'm not. I just think men are the root of all evil. Money's just the motivation. And something I'd like more of."

"Money can't buy everything," she chimed mechanically.

"When we have enough of it, you'll see that it does."

"Enough? Aren't you rich?"

"Shouldn't you have asked me that before marrying me?"

She frowned at him and he went on, an energy to his voice she had never heard before. It was calculating, but with a deep, low fervor.

"I haven't been slaving away all day for nothing, leaving my puerile bride in our wedding bed for a quick buck here and there. I am working harder than you ever will, or ever have, to gain my fortune out of the impending wreckage of our archaic kingdom, a fortune you will undoubtedly profit from. And when I have all the gold that this destruction is going to smelt together for me, then we'll see how you talk about what money can and cannot buy. Darling, it's going to buy our future. And for a son who was kicked out of his home penniless and with only the clothes on his back, that means something."

She stared at him, the pincers of confusion and anxiety poking at her brain. What had he meant about wreckage and fortunes? Wasn't he already wealthy? And what was going to be wrecked? Scarlett thought of the troops practicing drills out by the marina, the construction of war ships in the bay, and the banners flapping in every shop window. The trappings and signs of the war to come, the war she hadn't had the time or interest to contemplate. But, the war wouldn't do all that—it was going to be over in one battle.

Something with sharper, deadlier blades stabbed her as she thought this, more piercing than the pokes from before. She was beyond her depth. These fears were beyond her grasp. She saw Rhett again, her eyes clearing of the stormy clouds, and knew he held the answers.

"What wreckage Rhett? What's going to happen?"

His eyes glinted at her, shining with a recklessness that she was too distracted to notice.

"Nothing, Scarlett," he assured. "Nothing of importance, at least not at the moment, and nothing that I won't protect you from."

She looked into his dark, cloaked face and believed him. For whatever reason, she believed him. Still his words had touched a nerve, cycling back the turmoil that her dream had created in her only an hour ago. If a tempest was twisting her way, she wanted to be at home when it hit.

"I want to go to Tara, Rhett," she declared. "I have no intention of staying here, if you're callous enough to leave me. I want to go home."

He studied her for a minute, still reclining back in that easy, languid pose. His voice was both kind and cruel when he answered.

"I don't mind if you visit your family while I'm away, Scarlett, and can make arrangements for you to travel a little, but I expect you to be waiting for me, on the docks, when I make anchor."

She bristled under his causal command. She'd never liked being told what to do. And if she had thought marriage with him would have come with any perks, it was a sense of autonomy. Hadn't he blathered on about it only yesterday?

"Whatever happened to my being free? Or have you already forgotten your fine speech about rescuing me? Not twenty minutes ago you boasted about it again. Has your memory gone to mush?"

"You are free, but freedom comes with a price. Everything does. And the price of your freedom is to welcome this lonely sailor back to land when his ship sails in."

She glowered at him. "Oh really? And do you want supper right there, too? Or would you prefer I just come in nothing but my shimmies?"

A flush blasted over her skin. She hadn't meant for that to come out.

Rhett chuckled and roved his teasing gaze over her body, leisurely stripping her down with his lusty eyes. "While I'm not usually opposed to sharing, I think I would prefer to keep you all for myself. You can come fully-clad. Just make sure your clothes can be easily removed once we're inside."

She frantically peeled the collar of her wrapper up against her neck, muttering incomprehensible curses under her breath. The blame directed at herself as much as at him.

"Oh, you're impossible!" she shouted.

"Don't play cat and mouse with me," he said, a lewd smile on his full lips. " Just as you shouldn't give useless threats, you shouldn't promise what you can't fulfill. Although, while we're on the topic, I'll give you my word that I'll be a good boy while I'm away, as long as you give your word that you'll be a good girl too."

In her flutter of embarrassment, it took her a moment for his promise to sink in. And when it had, her eyes popped and she blushed even redder. Her repulsion barley won over her horror.

"I…I can't believe you would accuse me—I would never think about breaking my wedding vows. How disgusting!"

"Oh, I'm sure your fidelity will be beyond reproach, as mine will be too, but I thought it might be a good idea to clarify what I would categorize as faithful and what I would categorize as unfaithful. You'll find I'm very generous. I'm going to be gone often and for long periods of time. Depending on how long our Lady the South can subsist on arrogance and ideals, this pattern could possibly continue for a duration of several years. Now I'll be risking my life for our shared coffers, and I think the least you could do is to fulfill your obligations."

A smooth cruelty crept into his voice and commanded her full attention. Rhett leaned forward, no sign of drowsiness or fatigue on his hard face. Her humiliation and outrage leaked out of her, compressed into wonder by the intensity of his words.

"I know your upbringing considers actual adultery a mortal sin, which for once makes me grateful there's a Pope in Rome, but don't forget that to lust after another man is as deadly a sin as sleeping with him. Flirt and dance as much as you like, Scarlett, I don't care. But if I come home and find you've fallen for another woodenheaded, worthless gentleman, I'll have Rebekkah chain you to a stone wall and lock you up every time I go away thereafter. And don't think you can fool me, either. I don't need to eavesdrop on you to know what goes on behind that deceptively innocent face of yours."

He reclined back into his chair, the weariness of the day settling back over his striking features. Again she attempted to see through to his thoughts, to sort out what those enigmatic flashes of eagerness meant, to wrest the significance from his impenetrable face. Again she failed.

A church bell rang out, tolling five distinct times. Dawn was inching its way into their hotel room, sunlight crawling over the furniture and carpet. Scarlett looked at the fire. The blaze had shriveled into mere embers. A chunk of charred log broke off, sending dusty cinders into the air. One of the pieces floated out of the hearth and landed on her nightgown. She picked it up with the tip of her finger and wondered what Rhett had meant about spinning gold out of the ashes.

She brushed the ash onto the floor, and noticed the forgotten food on the rug. Her hunger returned to her—but not for food. The desire radiated out from her core and onto her flesh. Blushing, she cast a sidelong glance at Rhett. And then she frowned. He had fallen asleep. Marriage was nothing like she had expected.

_ Note: I have to remember that just as Scarlett's different, so is Rhett. He's so much more flirtatious and open in the beginning, liberal with his compliments. He's also well-to-do but by no means rich. When we really get to know him in the book, he's made his fortune. He hasn't yet, not really. And Rhett is the one who teaches Scarlett to love money...well, him and her poverty._


	7. Chapter 7

_LONG Note: (Skip at your pleasure, or read at your leisure.)_

_I edited all the other chapters. I wanted to collapse chapters 4 and 5 into one. But I didn't because I think that would mess with reviews for chapters. They should have been the same chapter all along. Many of the reviewers have commented on Scarlett's seemingly contradictory self. I think she was a big mess of contradictions: from her face to her background to her behavior to her intelligence. GWTW is made up of long, lengthy passages of perceptive musings that end with a line about Scarlett "hearing and seeing and living" in these things, without really understanding them. Still, she managed to be aware of them on some level, even if she was unable to fully grasp them. _

_With that said, I did take out a few lines and paragraphs that I intended to be more narrative in nature and not really from her own mind. Thanks to your insightful reviews, I realized I had put them in too hastily. (I re-pasted one in this chapter because it fit better.) I left in most of the thoughts about Rebekkah, though. I don't think Scarlett was overly intuitive about that. In here, it went along the same lines as her knowledge of 'low women,' as one reviewer pointed out._

_Another reviewer thought Rhett knows her too well already? I was thinking: hey, he did already meet her parents and spend a night in her house. It's amazing how much you learn about a person when you meet their family and stay the night in their childhood home, add that little bit to the fact that Rhett's an excellent poker player and didn't take his eyes off her at the barbecue and…well… _

_And most importantly, in my version verses the original: I'm hoping on a different outcome. :)_

_Sorry this update took so long to get to. Thanks for the prods. Thanks for the reviews. _

Chapter 7

The next few days passed away much in the same timeless, oppressive haze as that first full day in Charleston. Every morning, Rebekkah towed Scarlett all around town. Their walks never lasted as long as that first endless march and Rebekkah would periodically ask Scarlett how she was fairing, or without asking, sense her fatigue and slow her tireless feet down to grant Scarlett's soul and soles some rest. As they strolled by monuments or sat underneath palm trees, Rebekkah would ceaselessly talk in that low, refined accent about families Scarlett doubted she would ever meet and regale her with tales of traditions Scarlett doubted she would ever want to participate in. Unwittingly, though, the trickle of knowledge sunk through Scarlett's thick, uninterested brain. By the third day, the sounds of these family names and the glimpses of their faces became as familiar as the rub of the cobblestones against Scarlett's heels or the smell of the maritime fauna in the breeze—or the tingle of the sun as it scalded her pale cheeks.

Scarlett didn't once ask why these daily promenades were so important, more vital than even the health of her skin. She thought that would betray her as weak. And so she held back the torrent of complaints that would occasionally froth up, choosing to only mentally mope and moan. Marshalling all of her superficial graces, she minced and jingled throughout the mossy streets, frequently cursing but never guessing at the reason behind the two-woman caravan. Unanalytical she couldn't have guessed right if she had ventured a try. She couldn't know the frail sympathies that were sprouting up in the hardened hearts of the Charleston matrons as they surreptitiously watched her; clueless to the whispered conversations that the sight of her pretty, heat-kissed face stirred up behind the seemingly sealed shut doors, the quiet rush of chatter around sewing circles and newly-organized wartime committees that could potentially lead to her absolution.

Scarlett could not hear the low roar of the turning of the tide for her acceptance into an impregnable society, but Rebekkah did. She knew. She noticed how not only the old men would stop and tip their hats at Scarlett, but how once or twice their wives would covertly glance at her, pucker their thin lips and infinitesimally shake their heads in disapproval. Her keen ears could hear their thoughts, read their predictable minds, how that poor child was being dragged about town, her scoundrel husband abandoning the dear all day long without even bothering to buy her a proper sun bonnet or parasol, how the sins of the husband should not be passed onto the wife, especially such a stunningly fair, young girl.

Rebekkah heard and saw it all because it was what she had planned to hear and see, what she had skillfully intended for _them_ to observe and condemn. Each and every morning stroll, she languidly chatted, and Scarlett languidly listened. She kept quiet about her plans, though, as quiet as she kept about everything, and while she would not share her thoughts with Scarlett, she was fascinated by Rhett's bride, fascinated that she seemed unaware and uncaring of her impact on her environment. Under the sun and eaves of the Charleston skyline, Rebekkah silently studied the wild docility of the girl that flounced beside her, Scarlett's hips sashaying to an unknown, illicit beat and her green eyes betraying her careless attitude. And when Rebekkah wordlessly cared for the girl after their strategic outings, stripping off the stockings spotted with the blood of broken blisters or unloosening the binds of the painfully cinched corset, without eliciting so much as a whinny of complaint, she wondered what she would do with this child when this child inevitably bucked too hard and broke free—especially if Rhett was gone.

Still onshore and Rhett was already gone more often than he was around. Rebekkah didn't like it, but she didn't speak her mind. Silence had saved her from many a heartache and many a hurt. And so her lips remained closed and her eyes open, her fascination warring with her fear of the untamed wife that Rhett had chosen; a wife who was as dense about her surroundings as she was about her husband.

Not that Scarlett had much opportunity to study him.

Over the span of these few sluggish days, Rhett came and went at all hours. Twice he was gone before Scarlett woke up and returned just as she was climbing into bed. Another time he woke her up with the dawn, nuzzling her neck and tickling her toes, and then forced her to eat with him—an early breakfast for her and a late supper for him. A couple times he loped in with the twilight, his bronze skin perfectly blending in with the shadows of the golden dusk. Only a few days had passed, but no pattern or predictability stuck out to Scarlett of when or if her husband would come back to the hotel. He never gave her straight answers on what exactly he was doing or when exactly he would be leaving. She never knew when to expect him, and so within two days, she stopped asking him most things and stopped expecting him at all.

One day, when the sun was high and hot in the sky, Rhett surprisingly strolled into their room during the afternoon. It was a sweltering, sweaty day, the kind when the balmy sea air has thickened into blanket of steam and not even the insects buzz in the stagnant wind. Scarlett was fanning herself in front of the balcony, dozing in the humid heat, and didn't realize it was her husband instead of Rebekkah until Rhett snatched the rice-paper fan from her hand and poured a bucket of icy sea water over her. Impulsively she screamed and stood up, spluttering the water from her mouth and whisking it from off her face. He laughed at her, making some jab about cats hating baths, but as the chill of the sea melted the fever from her skin, she didn't care about his prank or his joke. She swiped the lingering droplets from her eyes and sighing, asked if he had brought anymore. The puckish leer on his lips snarled into a much more devilish and subtler grin. The bucket went flying across the room and, grabbing her around the waist, Rhett pulled her into a kiss.

The kiss was wet and salty, and through the dampness of her dress Scarlett could more easily feel the heat of Rhett's body on her skin. His lips skidded down her neck and his hands sleeked down her skirts. He picked her up by her legs and carried her over to their bed. In a faint murmur she cried that it was the middle of the day, that he hadn't locked the door, and that it just wasn't proper. His response was to cover her mouth with another kiss. That stirring in her abdomen swirled. Her body surged with life. Rhett began removing the layers between them. And Scarlett opened herself up to experiencing once more the only thing that she had come to expect and could predict from her husband—his passion.

That daybreak when he had fallen asleep had been the only time he had come back to the hotel and given her more than an hour's pause before he would reach out for her, press her into him, and as she was falling into that known and unknown abyss, fall on top of her. Sometimes he would be as swift and sharp as a bullet. Other times he would be slow and meticulous as a blade. He would laugh and play one minute, teasing her to the point of distraction, and then whisper sweet nothings into her ear and tenderly caress her, the next. No matter how many times it was repeated, it was never the same. _He_ was never the same. But Scarlett was.

His passion had hollowed out a hunger in her gut, an aching, constant wanting. It was as though he had unlocked something inside her, something he was never meant to unlock, but something he was always bound to discover. He was a man of unvarnished lusts and sensual appetites, but instead of shrinking from his fleshy fervor, she had risen to it, grappling and grasping at it. Every time he abruptly yanked her into his arms or seductively drew her toward him, every moment of his skin on her skin and his lips on her lips, cracked open that emptiness that only his continuing and constant touch could fill. But then he would leave, again, and she would try to forget it and move on as a lady should—wondering as she rose up from the daze of his love, if it had happened at all. And she would wonder that, slowly chew on it, even as she fought to ignore it, until Rhett came back, and her hunger would return.

Sometimes she wanted to ask him if it meant he loved her, for surely a man couldn't do that with a woman and not love her, but Scarlett figured he would just laugh at her if she asked him, or pat her on the head with that devil-me look in his eye. During those rare occasions of quiet between them, while he would hold her flush against his bare chest, she almost did ask him, and then the she would think of what she imagined other wives would do and how other ladies would act, and her lips would press together before she had even taken in a breath. Sick in the heart with longing for Tara and Ellen, she instinctively held on more ferociously to what she believed she ought to be and what she feared she never would become. And so even in those infrequent moments, when she remembered to ask him and wanted to ask, she never could.

_~Souffle~_

Scarlett had been in Charleston for exactly one week when she received her first visitor. It was the day after Rhett's unexpected afternoon visit. The weather was cooler than the previous day, the fog of humidity had broken earlier in the morning and dumped fresh rain onto the earth. When Scarlett saw the door unlatch, her breath hitched in anticipation, and then, the hinges creaked and the door swung wide open and Rebekkah walked in, with Scarlett's Aunt Eulalie on her heels. Scarlett's anticipation immediately crumbled into suspicion. As desperate as she was for some real companionship, she couldn't think of a single good reason why her aunt would suddenly break her code of silence and breach through enemy lines, with the enemy still at large. Rhett had made it clear that neither of her aunts would make her any overtures until after he had left the country.

Eulalie only nodded her greeting, and Scarlett coldly nodded back. Rebekkah disappeared back out into the hall, and Scarlett wished she could leave with her. Unmoving, she lounged on her favorite perch beside the open balcony doors and silently watched her aunt tiptoe across the expansive hotel room.

Eulalie's shriveled hands were curled up in nervous disgust and her critical gaze was taking in the whole of the scene. Despite the coolness of the afternoon, a sheen of rosy sweat still glistened on her slack face and supple arms. Not very kindly, Scarlett thought she looked like a deflated sow dressed up in black silk. Since Scarlett could remember, she had always worn the same dreary variations of widow's garb, though her husband had been dead for years. She was at least ten years older than Ellen, her flaxen hair and disturbingly clear eyes so different from Scarlett's mother that Scarlett wondered for the hundredth time in her life how the two sisters were related at all.

Eulalie sat down on the edge of the chair across from Scarlett, as though resting too far back into the cushion would soil her for good. Scarlett wasn't about to open the conversation or falsely gush about how grateful she was that her aunt had deigned to call on her.

"Afternoon Scarlett," her aunt said shortly. "This is a pleasant room. You must have a fine view of the bay."

"Would you like to take a look from the balcony, or are you afraid somebody will notice you're visiting someone who isn't received, auntie?"

Scarlett asked this in a sickly, sweet voice, adding a bit of her father's Irish brogue for good measure. Her aunts had always thought she was the child of a mésaliance and she was fed up with holding back her tongue and playing nice. Eulalie swelled in affront.

"How you can say such things to me—have you any idea the risk I have taken upon myself in calling on you today?"

"Don't bother doing me any favors. I'm managing just fine without your graces."

"And you would do a heap better if you learned to manage your tongue, Scarlett. You are ignorant of the endangerment your marriage has had on my reputation and your Aunt Pauline and Uncle Carey's reputation amongst our friends, not to mention the potential damage your thoughtless elopement might inflict on your sisters' ability to marry into an upstanding family."

"My sisters—"

"Your sisters," Eulalie swiftly broke in, her face growing redder by the syllable, "will likely have to be shipped off to some forsaken corner of our glorious new nation in order to find themselves a husband. Now you have lived in the wilds of North Georgia for far too long, and apparently, so has my sweet, woebegone sister. She has been away from civilized folk for so many years she has forgotten what is expected of a Robillard of Savannah. Now I did not come here to hear any lip from you, Scarlett, or to have you blow your airs in my face. I came as family and as a wishful protector."

"I don't need any protection," Scarlett grumbled. Eulalie's reference to Ellen had stung Scarlett and whipped some of the wind out of her. No one need remind her how horrified her mother had looked the minute she had realized who Rhett was and why he was at Tara.

"Of course you do," Eulalie said tartly, settling into the chair some and petting down her heavy skirts. "Everyone needs protection, especially you."

"Why? Has the war started already?"

"No, but your," her aunt paused and looked like she was choking on her own saliva, before she spat out, "your husband is leaving you very soon, likely by tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" Scarlett asked, startled by the information. "How do you know that?"

Eulalie cocked her head to the side and frowned. There was suddenly a hint of kindness in her flat voice. "Oh, dear, I know this is all so new and frightening to you, and I can see how affected you are by his cruelty. I just don't know how your mother thought disavowing the engagement would have been worse for your reputation—you are much too pretty and brash to have turned out like poor Louisa Plimpton."

Scarlett felt puzzled and slightly ashamed by her aunt's sudden change in tone, as always mystified when people attributed thoughts and emotions to her that were not her own. Her mother hadn't fought to keep the engagement intact, she had. Again, her aunt misread her confusion.

"Oh, no. I thought even you had heard about his, uh, buggy ride experience. You have, haven't you?"

Scarlett's interest was immediately spiked by the promise of gossip, gossip about Rhett no less. Oh, if she learned things about him that he didn't want her to know, she might finally stand toe-to-toe with him when they argued and be able to give him a dose of his own mind-reading, mortifying medicine.

"Yes." Scarlett said, leaning forward a little. "Louisa Plimpton was the girl he ruined?"

"Don't look so delighted, Scarlett. It isn't becoming, but yes, she was." Eulalie fanned herself with her hand and hesitatingly went on in, "You are married now, so I don't have to worry about your maidenly delicacy as much, still. I had hoped to discuss other matters with you, but this should be talked about before anything else happens. To know is better than to wonder. I don't know what version of the story you heard, but I will tell you it as I know it—and as his mother's my closest friend, I know it better than most. The final act of rebellion that your…husband…did before his father justly threw him out has left its mark on all of Charleston, and one family especially. The Plimptons were a very good, old family, been around these parts for ages, they even have some kin in Savannah that I knew growing up. Well, when Rhett was kicked out of West Point, he came home as brazen and unbothered about it as can be, laughing about the fact that Rockwell had to come home with him—"

"Rockwell?"

"My child—don't you know anything? Rockwell's your brother now, and even if he is estranged you ought to know his name. Goodness, please tell me you know the other Butler family members' names!"

Scarlett sheepishly shook her head and Eulalie puffed up with wonder.

"It's worse than I imagined! You mean to tell me you don't know your new kin's names? Gracious!" Eulalie clucked her tongue in disapproval and began listing off, "Your father-in-law's name is Kingsley, then there's of course, his wife and my friend, Eleanor, and then, Rockwell, married to Helena Spade, and their two children—Bobby and baby Lydia. Eleanor's youngest child and Rhett's youngest sibling is a girl, Rosemary. She's Carreen's age and is still at home. Honestly, I knew Rhett was inattentive to your needs, but this is outrageous."

Scarlett digested this information as best she could, and trying to sound polite, prodded her aunt to continue on with her story, for once not bored by some one else's past and certainly not opposed to blackening her husband up a bit.

"Rhett can be so difficult, and distant," she said. "Oh, Aunt 'Lalie, what did he do to that Plimpton girl? How does it have something to do with his brother, with _my_ brother, Rockwell?"

"I'm getting to that, Scarlett," her aunt sighed, digging through her memories. "Now, Rhett came home and wasted no time in finding and cavorting with the worst sorts of people, drinking and gambling and shaming his entire family. I'd only just married Harrison, but Eleanor and I had already become fast friends—sometimes it's just like that with people—and she confided in me things she dared not tell another soul. Well, Rockwell attempted to curb his older brother's enthusiasm for, shall we say, less than savory entertainments. He and his best friend, Eldon Plimpton, yes, Eldon Plimpton was Louisa's older brother and Rhett's younger brother's best friend, they would foolishly fish Rhett out of the pits he enjoyed passing so much of his time in, clean him off, and make him go to the types of activities that a gentleman's son ought to attend. It was just around the time when Rockwell got engaged to Helena that they all went on a day trip to have a picnic. At some point, Rhett and Louisa were left alone and the two went off together in one of the smaller buggies—and for all afternoon they were missing. Now, that night, when they finally came back on foot, Rhett claimed a broken buggy wheel had hindered them and that he hadn't touched Louisa. However, the girl was quiet as wood about the whole affair, and what few but those in the families know, her clothes were damp and torn on her return. Eldon saw his sister's wet dèshabille and demanded that Rhett marry her. I'm sure you know the story from there—Rhett refused, and the foolhardy Eldon pressed the point. He was a terrible shot, and everybody knew Rhett had been able to shoot the eye of a jay in flight since he was seven years old. Well, they dueled. Rockwell acted as Eldon's second, and I don't think he's said two words to his brother since Eldon's death. I tried to be there for Eleanor, but that was when Harrison fell sick, God rest his soul. We mourned together after a few months, only she couldn't openly mourn as I could for my husband. Oh, that boy broke his mother's heart."

Scarlett sat in silence for a moment, no longer as titillated with interest as before. It was so much more tragic than the silly, bland version she had heard from Cathleen Calvert about a month ago. Now the victims had names and the villain a face—her husband's. Although, in her pity, swirled a stream of contempt. If Rhett had compromised her, she wouldn't have let him abandon her and kill her brother. She would have had the gumption to stand up for herself and her family. And kill the scoundrel herself if push came to shove—even if it came to a duel. Stupid brother and foolish sister! From nowhere, her imagination whirred with the picture of a gruesome, romantic suicide by a willowy girl. She'd never read a novel for pleasure, but Suellen constantly did, and after finishing one, would harp on and cry for days about the fictional girls who threw themselves off cliffs or poisoned themselves because their reputations were ruined and the men they loved gone. Scarlett hadn't put much stock into the possibility that such ridiculous fools existed, but now she wasn't so sure.

"What…what did happen to Louisa then?" she asked warily.

Eulalie looked her full in the face and bluntly said, "A worse fate than I ever thought possible."

"She died?"

"What?" her aunt cried. "What? No, goodness Scarlett! No, she had to marry a Yankee. She's in Boston—Boston of all places, last I knew. Have you heard a Bostonian accent? They speak like cattle with marbles in their mouths. And her parents had to flee to the reaches of the Everglades. How ghastly."

Scarlett snorted, a little disappointed and a little relieved by the drop in climax. Eulalie swiped the sweat from her brow and pursed her lips. She flicked her clear eyes about the hotel room once more and they darkened with displeasure.

"I did not come here to feed your taste for scandal, Scarlett. I just thought you ought to know the worst of the man you so hastily married, particularly since he is less than forthcoming with you. But I have let too long pass by without discussing the purpose of my visit. I hope your husband did inform you of my generous offer to house you when he departs?" She stopped and looked as if she was anticipating some comment of gratitude from Scarlett but found her niece would only nod tepidly at her. "Very well," Eulalie continued on, "as he will leave tomorrow, I won't expect you to arrive until the day after that. There will be strict guidelines about your conduct, and you must be on your best behavior. No more of your sass. No more of what I will call your country disregard for manners. You may bring Rebekkah with you—my cook loves her help in the kitchen. And I would never complain about eating her pies. But, and let me make this clear, absolutely no more morning walks about town."

Scarlett had been thinking of other things, while Eulalie had enumerated all of the things she wasn't supposed to do if she were to stay with her, which Scarlett wasn't entirely sure she wanted to do in the first place, but that last invective surprised her out of her stupor.

"No more walks? Who told you—"

"My dear, no one told me. Every one, including me, has seen you trotting all around town, from the Battery down to the beach. And in this uncommonly hot spring weather! Why I thought Rebekkah had more sense than to expose your tender skin to this kind of abuse. Oh no, I know people are talking about it, and don't you worry, they do not blame you, they blame your negligent husband. I mean, my word Scarlett, have you seen your tan lately? And your freckles? What is he aiming at? To make you ugly so no man will be tempted to steal his bride while he gallivants about on that dingy sloop of his?"

Her aunt huffed this all out in one, exasperated breath, and Scarlett scowled at her. True, she hated the walks, hated them more and more with each progressive step, but she hadn't thought they were anything to comment on. How fussy was this prickly town? Yet that was not what truly bothered her, or brought back the annoyance that had faded while in the throes of discovering Rhett's sordid history.

"What do you mean he's making me ugly?"

"Don't be offended now. It's only what everyone is saying."

This did little to appease Scarlett's vanity and she stood up, suddenly raging mad. "Everyone? Everyone is saying I'm…I'm ugly?"

"Sit down, Scarlett," her aunt unflinchingly commanded. Eulalie had just been to her weekly sewing circle and had heard her niece's name bandied about with equal parts compassion and scorn, and had hurried over here directly thereafter, wanting to capitalize on that modicum of kindness as soon as possible. She wouldn't suffer through another meeting like the one previous, where it had been nothing but degradation. The time to act was now, before the goodwill had expired.

"I will not sit down," Scarlett refused. "I want to know what all your arrogant peahens are saying about me."

"That is abominably disrespectful of you. You will sit and listen. As I said earlier, you are wholly ignorant of the trouble you have caused. I haven't seen someone so stubbornly bound to a foolish idea and a renegade man since your mother wanted to run off with Phi—"

Eulalie instantly cut herself off, her hand trembling against her thin lips and her face bleached of color. Scarlett could only stare blankly back at her. What was Eulalie talking about? Her mother run off with someone? Her perfect, kind, ceaselessly selfless mother, who smelled of sachet and wore a tight, thick bun like a nun, run off with someone—with a renegade man? Her aunt must be joking or mad or forgetful.

"Scarlett," Eulalie breathed, gliding her hand from her mouth to her rocking bosom, "you will forget what I, in my anger, just said. I was talking foolishly. I…I need to leave you now, but I will wait for you to come—"

"No," Scarlett said, in a fog. "No. Who are you talking about? What are you saying?"

"I cannot…" Her aunt's voice trailed off at the fire in her niece's eyes.

"You already have. Who do you mean? My mother tried to run off…with someone other than my pa?"

Eulalie closed her eyes and took in a long breath, as she exhaled, she answered, "Your mother was in love with our cousin Philippe. He died in a barroom gun fight and she married your father shortly after."

"How shortly after?"

Eulalie looked up at her, and whispered, "Days."

The single word traveled slowly to Scarlett's ears, and even more slowly to her brain. It moved as if through wax. And then when it hit, it exploded in rapid succession all across her body. The last wall of her peace came crashing to the ground. Her being ached with sadness and surprise and she slid back down into the chair.

"Scarlett, Scarlett," her aunt called, kneeling on the floor in front of her, and Scarlett dazedly turned toward her. "You must never speak of this after today. I should not have mentioned it. Now I did not approve of your mother's marriage to your father, but he has been much better than…well, she has been very content with her choice and with the life she has led. She is completely devoted to your father and to you children."

Eulalie kept talking; kept repeating over and over her belief in Ellen's perfect happiness and how Scarlett must never, ever tell what she had learned today. As the eldest of the O'Hara daughters, she had always been the strongest, and the bravest, and the smartest in the ways of the world, she could not let one little secret destroy her own life. And she was married now, married to a worldly man like Rhett, surely she must know that marriages were not always about girlish romance or youthful dreams, but about commitment and common sense and curtailing sin. Or so Eulalie said over and over, until her pleas at last leaked into her niece's notice, and Scarlett numbly nodded back at her.

Eulalie quickly departed after that, leaving Scarlett as unmoving on her chair as she had been upon her entrance. The only motion in the room once her dress swished out the door was from the breeze as it twisted Scarlett's razor-straight hair into tendrils. That was the only movement in the room until Rhett came back several hours later.

_Disclaimer: The views expressed by Eulalie on Boston and the Everglades are her opinions and do not represent my views. Boston is full wonderful history and people, and the Everglades is full of alligators and non-indigenous snakes. :) _


End file.
